Suzy McKee Charnas

Suzy McKee Charnas in 2006.
Born	New York City, United States
Nationality	American
Genre	science fiction and fantasy
Notable works	The Holdfast Chronicles
Notable awards	Hugo Award, Nebula Award, James Tiptree, Jr. Award, Gaylactic Spectrum Award, Aslan Award
Website
www.suzymckeecharnas.com

Suzy McKee Charnas (born 1939 in New York City) is an American novelist and short story writer, writing primarily in the genres of science fiction and fantasy. She has won several awards for her fiction, including the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. A selection of her short fiction was collected in Stagestruck Vampires and Other Phantasms in 2004. The HOLDFAST series, a four-volume story written over the course of almost thirty years (the first installment, Walk to the End of the World was published in 1974, and the last installment, The Conqueror's Child was published in 1999) is considered to be her major accomplishment in writing. The series addresses the topics of feminist dystopia, separatist societies, war, and reintegration. Another of her major works, The Vampire Tapestry, has been adapted (by Charnas herself) into a play called "Vampire Dreams". She lives in New Mexico.

Suzy McKee Charnas was born in Manhattan to two professional artists. Her father was an illustrator for Wonder Books, a company that made picture books for children, and her mother was a textile designer. Her parents divorced in her childhood. Charnas helped her mother raise one younger sister, who is six years younger than she is. Despite being from a low-income family, Charnas was able to pursue a prestigious education. She attended an arts high school in New York City and, influenced by her parents, even considered pursuing a career in the visual arts. She received her undergraduate degree from Barnard College, where she majored in economics and history. She continued her education at New York University, where she earned a Master's degree in education. She has taught in Nigeria as a part of the Peace Corps.

Charnas' work focuses on the sociological and the anthropological—rather than exclusively the technological—dimensions of science fiction. Her background in history and economics, as well as her experiences in Nigeria, have had a profound impact on her work. She had keenly explored the genres of Western, adventure, and science fiction in the books she had read earlier in her life, yet she realized that these books lacked strong female characters. She considers Ursula K. Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness to have been a major inspiration for the initiation of her writing career, as it was one of the first feminist novels she had encountered. Despite this, she did not intend to write feminist literature. Her work did not take a feminist slant until after the first draft of "Walk to the End of the World", which she had originally intended to be political satire.