Octavia Cade

Octavia Cade is a New Zealand writer. She’s constantly bouncing between science and horror and can never decide which one she likes writing about best. On the one hand science is full of wonder and learning, and on the other there’s never been a terrifying monster she didn’t love and low-key root for. More and more she’s getting into writing terrifying eco-fiction and cli-fi, purely because this means she doesn’t have to choose. Runner-up to both science and horror is food, and while she’s written a lot on food and horror—editing a collection of food horror stories, The Sharp and Sugar Tooth, for Upper Rubber Boot Books, and writing a series of award-winning columns on food and horror for The Book Smugglers—she’s also written on science and food as well. A novelette, “Eating Science with Ghosts”, was published by Asimov’s, and she’s slowly working on turning it into a pop science book. (She’s got a PhD in science communication, so has to use it somehow).

Mary Shelley Makes A Monster is her second poetry collection. The first, Chemical Letters, about a woman who spends her afterlife trapped in an apartment building modelled after the periodic table, was published by Popcorn Press and nominated for an Elgin award. Mary Shelley came about after she read a biography of the woman in question and started wondering how the monster would react to its actual creator and not that hopeless disappointment Frankenstein. It was meant to be a one-off poem until she started reading Katherine Mansfield’s journals and began to see certain similarities of character between Mansfield and Shelley. And an orphaned monster is in desperate need of a mother...​

Her stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Shimmer, as well as lots of other places. She’s won three Sir Julius Vogel awards for speculative fiction writing. She attended Clarion West 2016 and will be the 2020 writer-in-residence at Massey University/Square Edge (the first time the residency has gone to a speculative fiction writer, yay!). She’s got three unpublished novels looking for a home and is currently in search of an agent.​