We are delighted to announce that Spanish writer Marian Womack has joined the Luna Press family. Marian will be releasing an anthology with us in 2018.
These stories explore decaying scenarios—ghostly ruins, old university cloisters, snowed-in planets, nature itself—as fighting grounds for death and renewal. Ranging in location from Andalusia to Scotland and Siberia, these narratives—sometimes humorous, sometimes delicately gothic—bring together monstrous insects, ghostly lovers, retellings of Bluebeard, and interstellar explorers to form a coherent and touching narrative about loss and absence, which leaves a profound impression after turning the last page.
When we asked Marian about the impetus behind the stories she told us: "This is a collection of short stories written over a number of years, which indicates my developing interest in man’s impact on the environment, and what a possible ruined future might look like. Added to this has been my constant sense, as a Spanish woman writing in English, of standing apart from the mainstream, of having a position which might be seen as marginalised, but which I prefer to think of as being privileged in its ability to see things from a different angle."
The stories have already gathered wide support:
On "Black Isle": "[E]choes the most beautiful traditions of British language writing." Strange Horizons
On "Frozen Planet": "A dark, cold setting, with mirage and vision become indistinguishable. Descriptions are vivid, the ubiquitous snow displaying more colors than Lawrence had thought possible." Locus Magazine
On "Orange Dogs": "[F]illed with evocative passages.[" Gary Fry
On "Orange Dogs": "The best stories take innovative risks and have better payoffs... The eponymous "Orange Dogs" in Marian Womack’s tale are carnivorous butterflies, born in a future of floods and climate change." Publishers Weekly
Marian is an author, translator and editor, born in Andalusia and educated at the universities of Glasgow and Oxford. Her interests lie within the gothic genre, new weird, and genre-bending narratives; in particular exploring nature-writing and ecological dystopia. Her current doctoral work examines the connections between Gothic sensibility and climate-change fiction. She is also a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop (2014), and the Creative Writing Master's at the University of Cambridge (2016).
Her fiction and non-fiction can be read in Year’s Best Weird Fiction, vol. 3 (Undertow, 2016), Spanish Women of Wonder (Palabaristas, 2016), Barcelona Tales (NewCon Press, 2016), Apex, SuperSonic, Weird Fiction Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the Science-Fiction and Fantasy Network, the New Internationalist, and El País. She has contributed translations to The Big Book of SF (ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer), The Apex Book of World SF, vol. 4 (ed. Mahvesh Murad) or Castles in Spain (ed. Sue Burke), and has written for videogames.
She is co-editor of Ediciones Nevsky/Nevsky Books, a project based in Spain and the UK, which has published European speculative fiction in Spanish (Anna Starobinets, Nina Allan, Sofía Rhei or Karin Tidbeck), and is currently building a list in English translation of Spanish genre-bending writing.