Jo Walton

Jo Walton is a Welsh fantasy and science fiction writer now living in Montreal, Canada. She has a second career as a literary critic.

When she was "about 13", she read Poul Anderson's Guardians of Time, realized that she could write and wanted to write, bought a notebook, and started writing the same day.

Her novels include:
 * The King's Peace and The King's Name: Duology set in a fantasy world resembling Dark Age Britain, and featuring that world's equivalent of King Arthur.
 * The Prize in the Game: Another novel set in the same world.
 * Tooth and Claw: The novel Anthony Trollope might have written if he were a dragon.
 * The "Small Change" trilogy -- Farthing, Ha'penny, Half a Crown: Detective novels set in an alternate history where World War II ended with Hitler still alive and in possession of most of continental Europe.
 * Among Others: 15-year-old Mori has recently lost her twin sister at hands of their mother, a powerful witch. She escapes into fiction and the dullness of her boarding school life, but the world of fairies and dangerous magic is always closer than is comfortable. Loosely inspired by events from Jo's childhood in Wales.

She has also written many short stories and poems.


 * Small Change


 * Asleep for Days: Sulien, following a major battle in The King's Peace
 * Bizarre Alien Biology: in Tooth and Claw
 * Child by Rape: in The King's Peace
 * Confessional: in Tooth and Claw
 * Curse: In the King's Peace world, certain characters have the ability to lay a curse on someone that they will die the next time a certain thing happens; a major example in the series is a man who is cursed to die if he says his name in another character's presence.
 * Deconstruction: Tooth and Claw deconstructs the assumptions and tropes of Victorian novels by displaying an alien society in which they actually make sense.
 * Divided for Publication: The King's Peace/The King's Name
 * Evil Matriarch: in Among Others
 * Fantastic Religious Weirdness: "When we were robots in Egypt"
 * Fantasy Counterpart Culture: In The King's Peace series -- Tir Tanagiri (Britain), until recently held by the Vincans (Romans), is suffering from raids by the Jarns (Vikings), and so on.
 * Fantasy Contraception:
 * In The King's Peace series.
 * Lifelode
 * Geas: The novels set in the Fantasy Counterpart Britain have, courtesy of Fantasy Counterpart Ireland, "curses" that are very similar to the geases of Irish mythology.
 * Jackass Genie: In The King's Peace, the Jarns' god Gangrader, who finds it amusing to give his followers exactly what they asked for, in such a way that they don't get what they actually wanted.
 * Literary Allusion Title: Tooth and Claw is a quote from Tennyson.
 * Mad Oracle: Several examples in The King's Peace series. Part of it is that oracles can't see the future, only the futures of nearby alternate timelines, any one of which may or may not be the same as the future that actually happens.
 * The Noun and the Noun: Tooth and Claw
 * Reality Is Unrealistic: Refers to it as "The Tiffany Problem", where Tiffany is a perfectly legitimate medieval name (a variant of Theophania) but it looks and sounds too modern for readers.
 * Religious Robot: Played with in "When we were robots in Egypt".
 * Rogue Drone: Hanethe in Lifelode, who
 * Trial by Combat: in The King's Peace
 * Year Outside, Hour Inside: in The King's Peace