Greer Gilman

Greer Gilman's mythic novels Moonwise and Cloud & Ashes have (between them) won an Otherwise Award, a World Fantasy Award, a Crawford Award, and have been shortlisted for the Nebula and Mythopoeic Fantasy awards. Besides her two books, she has published other short work, poetry, and criticism. Her essay on 'The Languages of the Fantastic' appears in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature. A graduate of Wellesley College and the University of Cambridge, and for many years a librarian at Harvard, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She likes to say she does everything James Joyce ever did, only backward and in high heels.

The Matter of Cloud

In October 2023, Greer Gilman announced:

"This is miraculous. I've just finished the first draft of a third Cloudish novel, to follow Moonwise (1991) and Cloud & Ashes (2009), with which (I hope) it forms a diptych. Part of this is set before and after and at tangents to the timeline in that book, and part of it long centuries after, at the college for women Margaret dreamed of founding at the end of Cloud & Ashes. The book includes a fair bit of a pseudo-Jacobean blank-verse play, a sort of Winter's Tale."

In December 2021, Uncanny Magazine celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Moonwise with an in-depth interview on the Matter of Cloud.

"Moonwise is an amazing book, a work of genius. It deserves to stand beside Lud-In-The-Mist or the writings of Lord Dunsany as a truly original seminal classic. And yet the most remarkable thing about it is that, amidst its intense and serious magic and its astonishing use of words, it causes you to laugh aloud - quite suddenly, taken unawares by an outrageous pun or an ingenious one-liner. I love this book and admire its nature magic more every time I read it."

Diana Wynne Jones.

Cloud & Ashes consists of three tales: Jack Daw's Pack (Nebula finalist, 2001), A Crowd of Bone (World Fantasy Award winner, 2004) and Unleaving (a new novel-length story).

"Greer Gilman has a new book out! This is reason enough for women to swoon and men to throw their hats in the air..."

Michael Swanwick

Cloud & Ashes was a 2010 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award Finalist, and joint winner of the 2009 Tiptree Award.

A paperback edition of Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter's Tales by Greer Gilman was published by Small Beer Press in April 2015.

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The Ben Jonson Mysteries

Her first Ben Jonson adventure, Cry Murder! in a Small Voice won the 2013 Shirley Jackson Award for best novelette. Her second, Exit, Pursued by a Bear was published in 2014 by Small Beer Press as a print chapbook and as an ebook.

Ben Jonson has written the part of a lifetime for the Prince of Wales: he will play Oberon, the King of Faerie. It's only theater. What could go wrong?

More about Exit, Pursued by a Bear

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Greer Gilman has contributed a Foreword to the new Handheld Press edition of Sylvia Townsend Warner's Kingdoms of Elfin.

"A book for anyone who has heard the horns of Elfin in the distance at twilight, as much as it is for readers who crave fine literature and are certain that elves and their kingdoms are bosh."

Neil Gaiman

She wrote the chapter on 'The languages of the fantastic' in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature.

Her post-apocalyptic Cloudish short story, "Down the Wall", is included in the World Fantasy Award-winning anthology Salon Fantastique, now available as an ebook from Open Road. Reviewing the anthology story by story, Nina Allan said: "This is a night-fantasia, Mervyn Peake on speed, Gustav Dore drawn in words."

A Cloudish vignette, Hieros Gamos is included in the anthology, An Alphabet of Embers, edited by Rose Lemberg.

E-mail: nine at greergilman dot com