Sofia Samatar’s Opacities is a series of compact meditations on writing and the writing life. Rooted in an epistolary relationship with a friend and fellow writer, the book blends personal letters with notes on literature, turning to Édouard Glissant to study the necessary opacity of identity, to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha for a model of literary kinship, and to a variety of others, including Clarice Lispector, Maurice Blanchot, and Rainer Maria Rilke, for insights on the experience and practice of writing.

Samatar’s memoir The White Mosque tells the story of her trip to Uzbekistan to research a group of Mennonites who followed a charismatic preacher to Central Asia in the nineteenth century. Through this history of connections across borders of religion and ethnicity, Samatar considers her own Somali and Mennonite heritage, as well as missionaries, travel writing, apocalyptic visions, and the many ways we enter the stories of others. The White Mosque received the Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography and Memoir and was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award.

Samatar’s first novel, the epic fantasy A Stranger in Olondria, won the 2014 William L. Crawford Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and was included in Time Magazine’s list of the 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time and Esquire‘s list of the 50 Best Fantasy Books of All Time. Samatar also received the 2014 Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Her second novel, The Winged Histories, completes the Olondria duology, a project that both challenges and revels in the genre of high fantasy. Her short story collection, Tender, includes the Hugo and Nebula finalist “Selkie Stories Are for Losers,” the miniature bestiary “Ogres of East Africa,” and other tales exploring the fragility of bodies and landscapes. In Monster Portraits, a finalist for the Calvino Prize, Del Samatar’s elegant black-and-white grotesques inspire Sofia Samatar’s genre-bending exploration of monsters and the monstrous. Samatar’s second collaborative work, Tone, with Kate Zambreno, approaches the most elusive element of literature through a collective practice of reading and writing. In the novella The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, Samatar returned to speculative fiction with a story of starships, universities, carceral systems, and breath.

Samatar’s essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in Conjunctions, The New Inquiry, The Paris Review Daily, Obsidian, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, The White Review, North American Review, Research in African Literatures, and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into eleven languages. She holds a PhD in African Languages and Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied modern Arabic literature and wrote a dissertation on the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih.

Sofia Samatar lives in Virginia and teaches African literature, Arabic literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University, where she is Roop Distinguished Professor of English.