Octavia E. Butler

Octavia Estelle Butler grew up in Pasadena, California. Her father, a shoeshine man, died when she was small, and her mother cleaned houses to support them; Octavia sometimes went with her and saw how her mother was treated by employers. She was tall, painfully shy and dyslexic, and was bullied at school. She escaped into the public library and began writing stories at ten.

At twelve she watched a cheap film called Devil Girl from Mars and decided she could write something better. An aunt told her that Black people could not be writers. She kept going anyway, taking evening classes and eventually attending the Clarion science fiction workshop in 1970, where Harlan Ellison encouraged her.

Then came years of rejection. She worked as a dishwasher, telemarketer, warehouse worker and potato chip inspector, getting up at two or three in the morning to write before her shift. Her first novel, Patternmaster, appeared in 1976. Kindred, in which a modern Black woman is pulled back in time to a Maryland plantation, followed in 1979 and became a classic taught in schools.

In 1995 she became the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. Her Parable novels, imagining an America collapsing under climate change and extremism, have found a large new readership since her death. She died in 2006 after a fall outside her home near Seattle, aged 58.