Biography

 

25 words | 50 words | 75 words | 100 words | 150 words | Full bio
Honors and awards | Teaching experience

 

author photo of Marie Brennan
full-size image here
(credit Perry Reichanadter)

25 words

Marie Brennan is the award-winning author of the Memoirs of Lady Trent and other series, also writing as M.A. Carrick. Find her online at linktr.ee/swan_tower.

50 words

Marie Brennan is the Nebula and World Fantasy Award-nominated and Hugo Award-winning author of the Memoirs of Lady Trent, other fantasy series, several poems, and over ninety short stories. As half of M.A. Carrick, she’s also written the Rook and Rose trilogy. Find her at swantower.com and on Patreon.

75 words

Marie Brennan is a former anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly leans on her academic fields for inspiration. She is the author of more than twenty novels, ninety short stories, and several poems; her work has won the Hugo Award and been nominated for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. As half of M.A. Carrick, she has also written the Rook and Rose epic fantasy trilogy. For more information and social media, visit linktr.ee/swan_tower.

headshot of Marie Brennan
(credit Perry Reichanadter)

100 words

Marie Brennan is a former anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly leans on her academic fields for inspiration. She recently misapplied her professors’ hard work to The Market of 100 Fortunes andThe Waking of Angantyr. She is the Hugo Award-winning and Nebula and World Fantasy-nominated author of the Victorian adventure series The Memoirs of Lady Trent along with several other series, over ninety short stories, several poems, and the New Worlds series of worldbuilding guides; as half of M.A. Carrick, she has written the Rook and Rose epic fantasy trilogy. For more information and social media, visit linktr.ee/swan_tower.

150 words

Marie Brennan is a Hugo Award-winning former anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly leans on her academic fields for inspiration. She recently misapplied her professors’ hard work to The Market of 100 Fortunes andThe Waking of Angantyr, and together with Alyc Helms as M.A. Carrick, she is the author of the Rook and Rose epic fantasy trilogy, beginning with The Mask of Mirrors. The first book of her Hugo-nominated Victorian adventure series The Memoirs of Lady Trent, A Natural History of Dragons, was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Her other works include the Doppelganger duology, the urban fantasy Wilders series, the Onyx Court historical fantasies, the Varekai novellas, and over ninety short stories, as well as the New Worlds series of worldbuilding guides. For more information and social media, including her Patreon, visit linktr.ee/swan_tower.

Full bio

Marie Brennan holds an undergraduate degree in archaeology and folklore from Harvard University and pursued graduate studies in cultural anthropology and folklore at Indiana University before leaving to write full-time. Her academic background fed naturally into her work, providing her with the tools to build fantastical worlds.

Her first series, the Doppelganger duology of Warrior and Witch, came out in 2006. From there she moved to historical fantasy, first with the Onyx Court series (Midnight Never Come (2008), In Ashes Lie (2009), A Star Shall Fall (2010), With Fate Conspire (2011)), spanning three hundred years of London’s history, and then with the acclaimed pseudo-Victorian Memoirs of Lady Trent. The first book of that series, A Natural History of Dragons (2013), was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, and won the Prix Imaginales in France for Best Translated Novel; the final book, Within the Sanctuary of Wings (2017), won the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Fantasy Novel. The series as a whole was a finalist for both the Hugo Award and the Grand Prix l’Imaginaire. A resurgence of her academic work later produced the standalone Viking revenge epic, The Waking of Angantyr (2023).

Her fondness for role-playing games has led her to write both fiction and setting inspiration for several game lines, including Tiny d6 and Legend of the Five Rings, the latter featuring both the novella The Eternal Knot (2019) and the supernatural mystery series of The Night Parade of 100 Demons (2021), The Game of 100 Candles (2023), and The Market of 100 Fortunes (2024). For her work on Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit RPG (2023), she was nominated for a Nebula Award for Game Writing. In 2021 she began writing poetry, with her fourth publication, “A War of Words” (published in Strange Horizons) winning the 2025 Special Hugo Award for Best Poem.

Together with fellow author Alyc Helms as M.A. Carrick, she is the author of the Rook and Rose epic fantasy trilogy, beginning with The Mask of Mirrors (2021), as well as the upcoming historical fantasy duology, The Sea Beyond.

Brennan is a member of the Book View Café authors’ cooperative, where she has published the Wilders urban fantasies Lies and Prophecy (2012) and Chains and Memory (2016) as well as a number of short story collections and nonfiction works, including Writing Fight Scenes and the Patreon-supported New Worlds series of worldbuilding guides.

She has taught creative writing to both college students and twelve-year-olds, and has run a number of workshops on topics ranging from worldbuilding to fight scenes to how to perform public readings. When not writing or playing RPGs, she practices photography and shōrin-ryū karate. She lives with her husband in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more information and social media, including her Patreon, visit linktr.ee/swan_tower.

 

Honors and Awards

 

Teaching Experience

  • “Playing Well with Others” collaboration workshop, Clarion West (online), May 2022
  • “Getting Your Story Down to Size” workshop, Clarion West (online), September 2022
  • “Historical Research Techniques to Create Believable Speculative Worlds,” Sierra Writers Conference (online), Feb 2022
  • “Faith in Fantasy: Building Believable Religions” workshop, Sirens Conference, Oct 2021
  • “Writing Fight Scenes” workshop, Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers (online), February 2021
  • FOGcon workshop instructor (online), March 2021
  • “Public Readings from A-Z” workshop, Dream Foundry (online), January 2021
  • “Writing Fight Scenes” workshop, Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers (online), October 2020
  • “Building New Worlds: Language” workshop, Clarion West (online), September 2020
  • “New Worlds: Worldbuilding from the Ground Up” workshop, Clarion West (online), May 2020
  • “Building New Worlds: Folk Magic” workshop, Clarion West (online), April 2020
  • “Building New Worlds: Religion” workshop, Clarion West (online), April 2020
  • “Building New Worlds: Language” workshop, Clarion West (online), April 2020
  • “Building New Worlds: Lifeways” workshop, Clarion West (online), March 2020
  • “Writing Fight Scenes” workshop, Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers (online), February 2020
  • “Writing Fight Scenes” workshop, Clarion West, February 2020
  • Cinder Workshop instructor, September 2018
  • “Writing Fight Scenes” workshop, Convolution, September 2017
  • “Writing Fight Scenes” workshop, Gencon, August 2016
  • “Speculative Fiction,” Duke TIP program, Wake Forest University, Summer 2013
  • “Writing Speculative Fiction,” Collins honors program, Indiana University at Bloomington, Spring 2008
  • other teaching experience in topics of archaeology, anthropology, and folklore