Juliet E McKenna

Juliet E McKenna was born in Lincolnshire in July 1965, but now lives in West Oxfordshire with her husband Steve and their two sons, Keith and Ian. Even from an early age her interest in folk tales and mythology was evident. Her favourite subjects at school were History, English, and Latin. This led fairly naturally to a classics degree at St Hilda's College, Oxford (also attended by P-CON III’s Guest of Honour, Susanna Clarke) where she studied Greek and Roman history and literature. While at Oxford, she joined the Oxford University Speculative Fiction Group, and became interested in tabletop and live action role playing (or LARPing), as well as Aikido.

As time went on, Juliet found herself increasingly writing scenarios for the role-playing games she was involved in, and eventually herself and Steve were running an invitation-only LARP club. She says, ‘One of the most important things this taught me was what makes a good novel, what makes a good table-top adventure and what makes a good LARP scenario do have certain things in common but equally are very different in some crucial respects.’ It was during this time she wrote her first novel, a classic 'youth leaves home, rites of passage' tale, which got rejected unceremoniously. Time passed and, after spending some time working in her local bookshop (which allowed her to see the commercial side of the business from the inside), as well as attending the Crime and Mystery Weekends run at her old college in Oxford every summer (which allowed her to meet a number of writers, as well as agents and publishers), she had a much clearer picture of what was needed to stand a chance of breaking into publication. ‘What you need, I heard, is “the same but different.”’ All of this advice came in useful when she went to submit The Thief's Gamble, which became the first volume of The Tales of Einarinn, and her first published book.

The Tales of Einarinn, in five volumes, was followed by four volumes of The Aldabreshin Compass, and three volumes of The Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution. She is currently working on another trilogy, The The Hadrumal Crisis, the first volume of which, Dangerous Waters, was published by Solaris in August 2011. Besides all this, Juliet has also written Turns and Chances, an Einarinn novella; The Wedding Gift - An Illustrated Tale of Einarinn, which is available by mail order as an original 12,500 word short story illustrated by a range of the UK's leading comic book artists; and a Dr Who short story Losing Track of Time, which is available in Big Finish's anthology Short Trips: A Universe of Terrors.

Juliet also somehow finds time to write reviews and articles for all sorts of magazines and websites, and regularly teaches courses on writing, something she has been doing at P-CON almost from its inception, to a substantial amount of acclaim. She holds the distinction of being the only writer to have been a guest at all eight P-CONs thus far. She is also currently the chair of the bid committee for EightSquaredCon, who hope to hold the 64th Eastercon in 2013.

There is a considerable amount of useful information about Juliet on her website, not only about herself, but also about how she became a writer, as well as a number of useful and enlightening articles on various subjects, a lot of the related to writing.

I’ve said it many times before, and am unlikely to tire of saying it quite yet: Juliet is the very platonic ideal of a convention guest: smart, funny, versatile, and opinionated. We love having her over, and recommend her to you all.

Bio by Anne M Kletcha