Andrea G. Stewart

The idea for The Bone Shard Daughter arrived over lunch at a San Antonio WorldCon, when Andrea Stewart watched the writer Marina Lostetter nearly choke on a splinter of bone in her food. Her 2020 debut builds a magic system from precisely that: shards cut from the skulls of subjects, engraved with commands, and used to animate the constructs that hold an emperor's chain of floating islands together. It made the Locus shortlist for Best First Novel and the British Fantasy Award shortlist. Stewart studied economics, worked as a grants compliance officer, and placed short fiction with Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Daily Science Fiction before selling the book. The Bone Shard Emperor and The Bone Shard War closed the Drowning Empire trilogy.