Becky Chambers (author)


Becky Chambers is an American science fiction writer, and the author of the Hugo-award winning Wayfarers series. She is known for her imaginative world-building and character-driven stories.

Career

Chambers worked in theater management and as a freelance writer before self publishing her first novel, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, in 2014 after successfully raising funds on Kickstarter. The novel received critical acclaim and a Kitschies nomination, becoming the first self-published novel to do so. This prompted the novel to be picked up and re-published by Hodder & Stoughton and Harper Voyager. The novel was the first book in the Wayfarer series, which so far includes two sequels, A Closed and Common Orbit, in 2016 and Record of a Spaceborn Few, in 2018. The series won the 2019 Hugo Award for Best Series. She published a novella, To Be Taught, if Fortunate, in August 2019, with a story un-connected to the Wayfarers books. In July 2018 it was announced that she signed a two-book deal with Tor Books, with the first book, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, due to be published in May 2021.

Style and themes

Her Wayfarers series novels take place in a fictional universe, governed by the Galactic Commons to which humans are relative newcomers. She has been lauded for the strong world-building in the series, including multiple unique alien races. She has been noted for the complex and likeable characters who drive the story. Her work has been alternatively criticized and praised for the deliberate, character-driven pacing and lack of the propulsive plots typical of other space opera novels.

Awards

Won

Chambers was born in 1985 in Southern California and grew up outside Los Angeles. She moved to San Francisco to study theater arts at the University of San Francisco. She has lived in Iceland and Scotland before returning to California, where she currently resides with her wife.