Ann Leckie is an American science-fiction and fantasy writer, born in 1966, whose debut novel achieved one of the most celebrated sweeps in the genre's history.
A music graduate from St Louis, she worked at a string of jobs - waitress, receptionist, land surveyor, recording engineer - and began writing seriously after her children were born, later studying at the Clarion West workshop under Octavia Butler. She lives in St Louis, Missouri.
That debut, Ancillary Justice, is narrated by Breq, once the artificial mind of a vast starship distributed across many bodies, now reduced to a single one and bent on revenge in the rigidly imperial Radch; its play with identity, gender and empire - and its default use of 'she' for everyone - made it a landmark. Almost unprecedentedly, it won the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke and BSFA awards all at once. She completed the Imperial Radch trilogy with Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy, returned to the same universe in Provenance and Translation State, and turned to fantasy with The Raven Tower.
Thoughtful, formally inventive and quietly humane, she is among the most admired writers to enter science fiction this century.
