Octavia Butler

Octavia Estelle Butler was an American writer who lifted Black voices into the white-dominated genre of science fiction and won the field's highest honours along the way. Born in Pasadena, California in 1947 and raised by her widowed mother, who cleaned houses, she was a tall, shy and dyslexic only child who took refuge first in libraries and then in a battered Remington portable her mother saved up to buy her at the age of ten.

She studied at Pasadena City College and California State University, Los Angeles, attended the Open Door Workshop run by the Screen Writers Guild of America, where she met the science fiction author Harlan Ellison, and worked her way through the Clarion Writers Workshop in 1970. After years of dishwashing, telemarketing and pre-dawn writing, she sold her first novel Patternmaster in 1976.

Her later books include the time-travel slavery narrative Kindred, the Xenogenesis trilogy on alien gene-trading, the Parable novels with their prescient near-future America, and the vampire novel Fledgling. Her short story Bloodchild won the 1985 Hugo and Nebula Awards, and in 1995 she became the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.

Butler kept thousands of pages of journals and motivational notes to herself, archived after her death at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. She died in February 2006 from a fall outside her home in Lake Forest Park, Washington at the age of fifty-eight.

The name Octavia is the feminine form of the Latin Octavius, meaning the eighth, originally given to an eighth child. She wore it as a writer who reshaped what science fiction could be.