‘Happy That It's Here’: An Interview with Nalo Hopkinson

Summary

Oho. Like it starting, oui? Don't be frightened, sweetness; is for the best. I go be with you the whole time. Trust me and let me distract you little bit with one anansi story:

It had a woman, you see, a strong, hard-back woman with skin like cocoa-tea. She two foot-them tough from hiking through the diable bush, the devil bush on the prison planet of New Half-Way Tree. When she walk, she foot strike the hard earth bup! Like breadfruit dropping to the ground. She two arms hard with muscle from all the years of hacking paths through the diable bush on New Half-Way Tree. Even she hair itself rough and wiry; long black knotty locks springing from she scalp and corkscrewing all the way down she back. She name Tan-Tan, and New Half-Way Tree was she planet.

— Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber 1

Nalo Hopkinson, a Jamaican-born Canadian author, has become in less than a decade a critically acclaimed novelist of speculative/science fiction and an original voice in the critical and political debates about speculative fiction, feminism, and afro-futurism. For her three novels, Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Midnight Robber (2000), The Salt Roads (2003), for her collection of short fiction, Skin Folk (2001), and for her three edited anthologies, she has received wide critical recognition, including winning the Locus First Novel Award, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, and the World Fantasy Award, among others.