Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award winning author of Osama (2011), The Violent Century (2013) and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winning A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), in addition to many other works. He writes across genres, combining detective and thriller modes with poetry, science fiction and historical and autobiographical material. Tidhar’s work has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick by the Guardian and the Financial Times, and to Kurt Vonnegut’s by Locus.
Tidhar was born in 1976 on a kibbutz in northern Israel, where he discovered SF/F in a cache of the Israeli SF magazine Fantasia 2000 gathering dust in the collective’s library. Upon moving with his family to South Africa in his teens, Tidhar adopted English as his primary creative language. His first publication, however, a collection of verse translated as Remnants of God, appeared in his native Hebrew in 1998. He launched his career as an English-language SF/F writer in the online magazine Chizine in 2005.
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (www.sfe.com) describes the writer, who now resides in the UK, as a postmodern pioneer of Equipoisal Fantastika. “Tidhar’s literary strategy,” it intones, “repeatedly relies on the recycling of stereotypes and clichés drawn from classical pulp SF and detective fiction, traditional mythologies and contemporary popular culture.” This penchant can be identified in his first English-language collection of linked short stories, Hebrewpunk, published in 2007. It reaches full steam(punk) in his Bookman sequence (2010-2013), three linked novels transpiring in an alternate Victorian England under the claws of an alien reptilian alien race. But it is in his World Fantasy Award-winning novel Osama (2011), which channels noir, alternate history à la Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle and Timeslip, that breaks free into new psychological and genre-shifting territory. “The Smell of Orange Groves” is featured in Central Station (2016), winner of the John W. Campbell Award and a Locus and Arthur C. Clarke Award nominee. It is a mosaic novel set around a spaceport erected several hundred year’s hence on the ruins of the eponymous Tel Aviv bus station.