Literary Birthday – 19 April – Arkady Martine

Happy Birthday, Arkady Martine, born on 19 April 1985.

Arkady Martine Quotes

1. Writing a novel is the worst thing I have ever done to myself on purpose! (MithilaReview)
2. I wanted to write about the scenarios that I had encountered in my research. Not a historical novel where I would, like, tell those stories. But, then where I found myself imagining the emotional impact of living through and experiencing historical events I had been studying. (Writing Excuses)
3. I love structure, and structure games, and the freedom that writing short fiction allows me to play with unusual forms…Structure is one of the ways that I find freedom and expansiveness. It is a form of play. (Uncanny Magazine)
4. I write science fiction when I’m not trying to write anything else; it is my natural mode of expression for narrative. (Strange Horizons)
5. It is the ‘opera’ part as much as the ‘space’ which interests me. Narrative which is high-intensity, high-drama: vivid emotionally and vivid conceptually. And far-future science fiction is my favorite place to interrogate large philosophical and ethical questions from sideways angles. (Strange Horizons)
6. The plot structure of this book [A Memory Called Empire] is heavily inspired by classic spy novels. I read a lot of John le Carré, and what I adore about his work is both the intense internality of a protagonist engaged in spycraft—how they have to think about what they’re doing from multiple, mutually contradictory angles, all the time.
7. What I am doing when I write – in part – is trying to formulate a poetics of exile. My poor characters. Pretty much no one gets to go home. (MithilaReview)
8. I am, in essence, interested in writing protagonists who are deeply emotionally involved with the other characters in a story. Both same-gender and other-gender emotional attachments are part of the constellation of narrative-warping, plot-creating forces. (MithilaReview)
9. [My favourite part of writing A Memory Called Empire was] writing the epigrams that start each chapter. It was amazing to get to write little snippets of in-universe texts — a history, a television script, some bureaucratic paperwork, a restaurant guide, all sorts of things. It helped me flesh out the world and I think it makes the entire universe feel real for the reader, too. (MyBooksMyEscape)

Arkady Martine is an American author of science fiction literature. Her first novels, A Memory Called Empire (2019) and A Desolation Called Peace (2021), each won the Hugo Award for Best Novel. She has written a novella, Rose/House, a science fiction Gothic thriller. A list of her short stories can be found here: Short Stories. Martine is a speculative fiction writer and, as Dr. AnnaLinden Weller (her real name), a historian of the Byzantine Empire and a city planner. She lives in Santa Fe with her wife, the author Vivian Shaw.

Source for image: Author’s Website Credit: Karen Osborne

by Amanda Patterson

Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: Literary Birthday Calendar