Andrea Stewart

Bone shard magic, in which slivers cut from a subject's skull are carved with commands and used to power the constructs that serve an emperor, holds together the whole of Andrea Stewart's Drowning Empire trilogy. The Bone Shard Emperor, published by Orbit in November 2021, follows Lin Sukai after she takes the throne of an island chain whose islands keep sinking, and The Bone Shard War closed the sequence in April 2023. Stewart is the daughter of immigrants, grew up in several parts of the United States and now lives in California. Her short fiction ran in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction and Galaxy's Edge ahead of a first novel, The Bone Shard Daughter, arrived in 2020 and reached the Locus shortlist for a debut, and the British Fantasy Award shortlist. She has since started a second sequence, The Hollow Covenant, and coaches writers at The Novelry.