About

The Official Bio:

Lynda E. Rucker’s short stories, essays, reviews and columns have appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, The Best Horror of the Year, The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Black Static, Postscripts, Nightmare Magazine, and Supernatural Tales. (A mostly complete bibliography is here.) Her work has been translated into Russian, Polish, and Italian. For a decade, she wrote a regular column on horror for Black Static.

She won a 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for her short story “The Dying Season,” which appeared in the anthology Aickman’s Heirs. Three collections of her fiction have been published. The most recent, Now It’s Dark, was released in 2023 by Swan River Press in Dublin, Ireland. Her first collection, The Moon Will Look Strange, was published in 2013 by the UK-based Karōshi Books and reprinted in 2019 as the first in a series of limited edition “Contemporary Classics” from Canada’s Undertow Publications. Her second collection, You’ll Know When You Get There , appeared in 2016, also from Swan River Press. .

She wrote a short horror playlet, “#goddess,” that was presented as part of an anthology play, “The Ghost Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore” and ran from March 7-19, 2016 at the Tristan Bates Theatre in London. In 2018, she edited volume 3 of the Uncertainties series from Swan River Press.

She has an MA in medieval English literature and has taught and tutored essay writing, fiction writing, and ESL for many years along with copyediting and ghostwriting for many different businesses and publications.

Interviews and podcasts:

Let the Cat In podcast, January 16, 2022: Buddha (and other assorted topics)

Author Panel, Omnium Gatherum Books, October 2020

Interview, Nightmare Magazine, about “The Dying Season” (February 2017)

Interview, 31 Hath October blog (October 2016)

“Why Can’t You Write About Something Nice?” Interview, Swan River Press site (Summer 2016)

Interview, Nightmare Magazine about “The Burned House” (and a few other things, like horror movies)

Interview, Nightmare Magazine about “The House on Cobb Street.”

The Real Me:

My name is Lynda E. Rucker.  I write stories.  They often seem to be about people who are lost, or longing for something that is just out of their reach. I don’t do that on purpose; I just follow the words and the images where they take me. I write about places I have known and people I have known or been and places I’ve never been and people I have never known, things I dream up inside my own head. How much of what writers tell us is from their own lives and how much is pure imagination? It’s a secret. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

I was born and raised in the American South but I lived in Oregon for a long time as well as in several other countries. When people ask me where I’m from, I never know what to say, because I am very much equal parts Oregonian and Southerner, one foot in the rain and one in the sun. The previous sentence used to be true but I find that the longer I am away from Oregon the more untrue it becomes while the beautiful, terrible, impossible South seems etched upon my bones.

I am at my very happiest when I’m traveling or writing down stories.