Maureen McHugh

Maureen McHugh was born in 1959, at the tail end of the baby boom generation, in Ohio. She's lived in New York City and the People's Republic of China. She has written four novels, China Mountain Zhang, Half the Day is Night, Mission Child, and Nekropolis, and a collection of short stories, Mothers & Other Monsters. Her first novel won the Tiptree Award in 1993. Her collection was a finalist for the Story Prize in 2006. Her novels are set in the Third World, both on Earth and in space, but in the last few years, she has written more and more about the very science fictional landscape of contemporary suburban America. Recently, she was a writer on "I Love Bees" and "Last Call"—alternate reality Internet games—a strange, surprisingly hidden new genre with a surprisingly large audience.

She has recently moved to Austin, in the Republic of Texas, which she finds almost as foreign as China.

For more, see her website