Liz Williams

Liz Williams (born 1965) is a British science fiction writer, historian and occultist. The Ghost Sister, her first novel, was published in 2001. Both this novel and her next, Empire of Bones (2002) were nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award.[1] She is also the author of the Inspector Chen series, and of the historical survey of magic in the British Isles and beyond Miracles of Our Own Making: A History of Paganism (2020).

Liz Williams at Imagicon 2: Swecon 2009.

Williams is the daughter of a stage magician and a Gothic novelist.[2] She holds a PhD in Philosophy of Science from Cambridge (for which her supervisor was Peter Lipton[3]). She has had short stories published in Asimov's, Interzone, The Third Alternative and Visionary Tongue. From the mid-nineties until 2000, she lived and worked in Kazakhstan.[4] Her experiences there are reflected in her 2003 novel Nine Layers of Sky. This novel brings into the modern era the Bogatyr Ilya Muromets and Manas the hero of the Epic of Manas. Her novels have been published in the US and the UK, while her third novel The Poison Master (2003) has been translated into Dutch.