<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Tanith Lee is a prolific and talented writer of dark fantasy, horror, and science fiction--though much of her work blurs genre distinctions, and all of it maintains a high literary standard. Born September 19, 1947 in London, England, she first began to be published in the early 1970s and has since built an impressive, varied body of work. All of her work is distinguished by her prose, vivid, beautiful, and trenchant, and by her far-roving imagination. The story goes that she didn’t learn to read until she was eight--and began to write at the age of nine, spurred on by the many fairy tales and fantastic legends her mother had always made up to tell her. Her first major publications in England were of children’s fantasies; her adult novel The Birthgrave did not find a home until she queried DAW Books in America. It was published in 1975 and followed by two sequels; between then and 1989 Lee published 28 books with DAW. Lee has been described as “goddess empress of the hot read and princess royal of heroic fantasy.” Her fiction is often dark, brooding, sometimes fevered and surreal, and never shies from the grim--or, in her adult work, the erotic and controversial--but the gothic is generally leavened by irony and humor, as well as by the power of her visual evocations of bizarre otherwheres. Her prose, in Michael Swanwick’s words, nearly “shimmers on the page.”

Lee’s fiction spans alternate historical and earthly settings, contemporary horror, and science fiction where the technology is so far advanced it functions somewhat like magic. The main themes which thread her work, of alienation, transformation, and redemption, can be found in both her young adult and adult works.

Protagonists in her young adult works are often spirited young women, such as Tanaquil in Black Unicorn, Gold Unicorn, and Red Unicorn, Claidi in the Claidi Journals, Hope Glover in Voyage of the Basset: Islands in the Sky, and Artemisia in Piratica and its sequel.

While the young adult works are intense and engaging, the adult work is far more potent. In the books of "The Flat Earth" series, mortals and immortals alike suffer death and rebirth, have deeply passionate and twisted relationships that span lifetimes, and quest, through it all, for meaning and the truth of the self. This threading of a theme through many eras and lives can be seen again in the Secret Books of Paradys and Venus, where linked stories of obsession, transformation, love, and violence are set in alternate cities of Paris and Venice. Weaving in both directions through time, the stories explore wickedness, destiny, mysticism, and love. In early works, such as Don’t Bite the Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine, the main character rages against a highly technological world first as a man, then a woman, back and forth, searching for meaning that is denied her/him by the authority and technology that make such gender swapping possible. Silver Metal Lover and its sequel Metallic Love explore sexuality in the context of the perfect man--a highly advanced robot--and the women who love him. In novels and collections like the masterful Red as Blood or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer, Tamastara, or, The Indian Nights, Cyrion, Sung in Shadow, Heart’s Beast, and Lycanthia, to name a few, Lee tells stories of outcasts and freaks, transformation--often into a beast of some kind--dark spirituality, reincarnation, and violent wonders with the skill of a latter-day Scheherazade.

Lee is the winner of multiple World Fantasy Awards and the August Derleth Award and has been nominated for dozens more. She has published an impressive number of novels and many short stories, all with her singular style and biting intelligence. She’s also written somewhat fabulist, but otherwise non-fantasy works of lesbian erotica under the name Esther Garber. She is married to writer and artist John Kaiine and lives in the south of England.