Award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer appointed as Richmond’s Writer-in-Residence

“A worldwide diaspora has left a quarter of a million people at the foot of a space station. Cultures collide in real life and virtual reality. The city is a weed, its growth left unchecked. Life is cheap and data is cheaper.”

Prolific author Lavie Tidhar has been recently appointed as Richmond’s very own Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer-in-Residence. Lavie, who will be teaching on Richmond’s MA Film: Science Fiction & Fantasy storytelling classes, has just released his latest work, the critically acclaimed Central Station, which has won the Chinese Nebula (Xingyun) Award for Best Translated Fiction, and also the John W. Campbell Award (2017) and Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award in Speculative Fiction (2018).

Lavie has received over 40 awards for his work including World Fantasy and British Fantasy Awards and being shortlisted for the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Further works by Lavie planned for release in 2021 are novels The Escapement (US) and The Hood (UK), and anthology The Best of World SF.

Lavie works across genres, combining detective and thriller modes with poetry, science fiction and historical and autobiographical material. His work has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick by the Guardian and the Financial Times, and to Kurt Vonnegut’s by Locus.

Central Station has received some great reviews, including one from Publishers Weekly:

“Magnificently blends literary and speculative elements in this streetwise mosaic novel… Tidhar gleefully mixes classic SF concepts with prose styles and concepts that recall the best of world literature. The byways of Central Station ring with dusty life, like the bruising, bustling Cairo streets depicted by Naguib Mahfouz. Characters wrestle with problems of identity forged under systems of oppression, much as displaced Easterners and Westerners do in the novels of Orhan Pamuk. And yet this is unmistakably SF. Readers of all persuasions will be entranced.”