Internationally renowned Nalo Hopkinson was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and also spent her childhood in Trinidad and Guyana before her family moved to Toronto, Canada, when she was sixteen. In 1997, Hopkinson won the Warner Aspect contest for Brown Girl in the Ring, and she received the John W. Campbell and Locus Awards for Best First Novel. Her collection Skin Folk received the World Fantasy and Sunburst Awards. The Salt Roads received the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for positive exploration of queer issues in speculative fiction. The New Moon's Arms also won the Prix Aurora and Sunburst Awards, making Hopkinson the first author to receive the award twice. In 2020, Hopkinson was named the Damon Knight Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, and is the youngest and the first woman of African descent to receive this lifetime honour. As a professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside, she was a member of the Speculative Futures Collective. Hopkinson is currently a professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, and she lives in Vancouver, Canada.
"""Jamaica Ginger is a powerful and salient reminder of just how amazing a storyteller we are graced with in the form of Nalo Hopkinson! This carefully curated collection is a tapestry of Nalo's mastery and truly displays what a master of the form can do."" --John Jennings, New York Times bestselling author and Hugo Award-winning comics creator [STARRED REVIEW] ""A commanding short story collection, Caribbean Canadian Nalo Hopkinson's Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions blends ecological awareness, cultural heritage, and fantastical happenings.... Climate change is a recurring theme: there are diseased, parched landscapes and ravaging floods. Many of the characters are resourceful women of color who are determined to improve their troubled environments; they summon remarkable scientific, technological, and mechanical abilities to heal others and solve problems. Enriched with a marrow of emotion, the short stories of Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions move beyond bleak dystopian landscapes into a curious universe marked by damage and possibility."" --Foreword ""Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions is a treasure box, a mojo pot of stories to break your heart and mend it too. Nalo Hopkinson's fables, ghost tales, alien encounters, and automaton adventures are a sheer delight. Magic on the page. Hopkinson's language carries you to revelation and joy. Characters you've been lusting after do tricks with your mind. These dazzling stories will reacquaint you with your spirits!"" --Andrea Hairston, author of Archangels of Funk ""I had encountered some of Nalo Hopkinson's stories before starting this collection and admired them. So it's with pleasure I can say this is another varied set with which she shows a talent for making strange and thought-provoking tales with concerns including Western and Caribbean cultures, gender, climate change and adaptation and resilience."" --Too Many Fantasy Books ""A m�lange of stories that spins together roots, dreams, and powerful tales the way only Nalo can. It's easy to get lost in the verses and images that drip from the page. A must read."" --Tobias Buckell, author of A Stranger in the Citadel Praise for Nalo Hopkinson ""A major talent."" --Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves ""Nalo Hopkinson has had a remarkable impact on popular fiction. Her work continues to question the very genres she adopts, transforming them from within through her fierce intelligence and her commitment to a radical vision that refuses easy consumption."" --Globe and Mail ""One of the best fantasy authors working today."" --io9 ""An exciting new voice in our literature."" --Edmonton Journal ""Like Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler, [Hopkinson] forces us to consider how inequities of race, gender, class and power might be played out in a dystopian future."" --The News Magazine of Black America ""Hopkinson's stories dazzle"" --NPR Books ""The power of Hopkinson's stories lies in their capacity to help us reimagine our own movement through the world and to wonderfully innovate new trajectories for speculative fiction as a whole."" --Los Angeles Review of Books ""Caribbean science fiction? Nalo Hopkinson is staking her claim as one of its most notable authors."" --Caribbean Travel and Life ""Hopkinson's prose is a distinct pleasure to read: richly sensual, with high-voltage erotic content and gorgeous details."" --SCIFI.com Praise for the short story collection Falling in Love with Hominids ""A must read for fantasy and short story fans"" --Portland Book Review ""Hopkinson's stories stack up well against their source of inspiration, but her voice is clearly her own, charged with deep feeling and vast imagination."" --San Francisco Chronicle ""The stories all share a common thread of magic, which is often woven, whether subtly or blatantly, into the fabric of everyday reality, allowing characters to react to the strange or the impossible as it crosses into their world."" --Publishers Weekly ""Falling In Love With Hominids by Nalo Hopkinson introduced me to speculative fiction with Black queer characters."" --Wear Your Voice ""Every reader will surely find something to love, as this collection is often hilariously funny, deeply tragic, intensely engaging, and strongly steeped with fantastic elements."" --Civilian Reader ""In this collection of luminous stories, Nalo Hopkinson writes with an observant intensity."" --World Literature Today ""Overflows with originality, beauty, and Hopkinson's trademark depiction of human decency."" --Women's Review of Books ""A wonderful treat for Nalo Hopkinson fans and a fantastic introduction for new readers."" --New York Journal of Books ""Nalo Hopkinson paints the places she knows in the way that M�rquez embodies the soul of Central America, or the way Bradbury captures Illinois summers."" --Fiction Foresight ""A writer at the height of her powers."" --The Canadian Science Fiction Review ""Hopkinson resembles Le Guin. Go find this book and read it."" --File 770 """"...a joyous celebration of Hopkinson's abiding legacy as a titan of both speculative fiction and Caribbean literature."" -- Publishers Weekly"