The Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop
Selected Awards & Announcements from Clarion Alums
Kelly Link (Clarion ‘95) sold new novel The Lover of Books, as well as an anthology of ghost stories and another title to Caitlin McKenna at Random House.
Grady Hendrix’s (Clarion ‘09) novel Witchcraft for Wayward Girls won the 2025 Goodreads Choice Awards in the Horror genre.
Senaa Ahmad’s (Clarion ‘18) debut short story collection, The Age of Calamities, was released January 2026 via Henry Holt and Co.
Shingai Njeri Kagunda’s (Clarion ‘22) novelette “We Who Will Not Die” (Psychopomp) won the 2025 Ignyte Award for Outstanding Novelette.
Sydney Paige Guerrero’s (Clarion ‘24) book Mapping New Stars: A Sourcebook on Philippine Speculative Fiction (The University of the Philippines Press, with Gabriela Lee & Anna Felicia Sanchez) won the 2025 World Fantasy Award, Special Award, Professional category.
“Clarion was a life-changing event not just because of what I learned about writing, but because it made me believe that I could be a writer.
Prior to attending Clarion, I’d been working in complete isolation. I didn’t know anyone else who was trying to write science fiction—I knew barely anyone who read science fiction. (…)
A lot of people say that going to Clarion is like meeting a family you didn’t know you had, and to me it definitely felt that way. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who had read the books I had read and understood the things I was interested in and were trying to do the things I was trying to do. (…) Going to Clarion was how I found there was a community for writers out there that I could fit into.”
— Ted Chiang
“Clarion consistently trains and turns out the sharpest, most talented, most wildly original voices in our field. Where lesser programs exert a normative pressure that forces all the work coming out of them to a kind of even keel of sameness, the Clarion workshop manages the nearly impossible trick of bringing out writers' individual voices, turning out vividly dreaming graduates whose work turns the field on its ear every five years or so.”
— Cory Doctorow
Alum Spotlight: Lara Elena Donelly (‘12)
Lara Elena Donnelly (2012) recently co-founded Homeward Books, a new small press dedicated to giving books that “defy the constraints of genre” a home. Homeward’s first release, The Witch of Prague by J. M. Sidorova, is scheduled for publication in March 2026. You can find more information about Homeward here.
Lara Elena Donnelly is a Nebula, Lambda, and Locus-nominated author. She administers the annual Alpha Workshop for Young Writers.
The Clarion Foundation team had some questions for Lara and the other founders, M. Huw Evans, Rachel Sobel, and Rebekah White, a collection of friends with a wealth of experience as writers and readers. You can read the full interview in our newsletter archives here.
