Octavia E. Butler

Octavia Butler broke numerous barriers with her extraordinary fiction, emerging at a time when few Writers of Color could be found in the field.

Butler produced two major series. The five-volume Patternist series tells of a society that is run by a specially bred group of telepaths. Her Xenogenesis trilogy deals with the destruction of humanity by nuclear war and gene-swapping extraterrestrials. A standalone book, Kindred, relocates a present-day Black woman to a pre-Civil War plantation through time travel.

Butler’s later novels, Parable of the Sower , and Parable of the Talents , both Nebula Award winners, form a diptych of a dystopian near-future America, seen through the eyes of a remarkable Black woman, Lauren Olamina, and her daughter Larkin.

In 1995, Octavia E. Butler was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for pushing the boundaries of science fiction. In 2000, she received the PEN Center West Lifetime Achievement Award.