Katherine Addison is the pen name of the American fantasy writer Sarah Monette, under which she has written some of the most admired secondary-world fantasy of the last decade.
Born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1974, she is a scholar as well as a novelist, holding a doctorate in English literature with a specialism in the ghosts of English Renaissance revenge tragedy - a preoccupation with death and its aftermath that quietly shapes her fiction. Under her own name she wrote the Doctrine of Labyrinths series and, with Elizabeth Bear, the Iskryne novels.
As Katherine Addison she is best known for The Goblin Emperor (2014), in which Maia, the despised half-goblin youngest son of the emperor, is unexpectedly thrust onto the throne and must navigate a glittering, treacherous court with nothing but decency to guide him; warm, intricate and humane, it won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel and was shortlisted for the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She has since returned to the same world for the Cemeteries of Amalo books - The Witness for the Dead, The Grief of Stones and The Tomb of Dragons - a gentle detective sequence following a cleric who can speak with the dead.
She lives near Madison, Wisconsin, with her spouse, her cats and her books.
