Name Benjanun Sriduangkaew | Role Author | |
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Books Scale Bright, And the Burned Moths Remain Nominations John W. Campbell Award for the Best New Writer | ||
PseudoPod 553: Fade to Gold
Benjanun Sriduangkaew is a Thai author of science fiction and fantasy, who is also known for controversial online criticism.
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Life
Sriduangkaew has said in an interview that she was born in Pattani Province in southern Thailand. After attending university in Bangkok, she worked in Manila, Jakarta and Hong Kong.
Work
Sriduangkaew began publishing short fiction in 2012, with "Courtship in the Country of the Machine Gods", and established a name for herself with a string of high-profile short stories in Clarkesworld Magazine and elsewhere, which led to her nomination for a 2014 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
Her first long-form publication was the urban fantasy novella Scale-Bright, published in 2014. A follow-up to her three Sun-Moon Cycle stories, it is a love story about a young woman from Hong Kong who has to rescue her sister from Heaven. Reviewing the novel for Tor.com, Niall Alexander described it as "an achievement without equal", appreciating its "delicately drawn characters", "affecting narrative" and the author's prose skills.
Online activity
In 2014 Sriduangkaew was revealed to have been the controversial blogger and book reviewer "Requires Hate" (also known as "Requires Only That You Hate", as well as "Winterfox"). Using these Internet identities, she published violently intimidating and harsh critiques, which included death and rape threats, of many writers she believed to have paid insufficient attention to racism, sexism, heteronormativity, or colonialism in their fiction. Many of her targets were themselves young, female, transgender, and/or persons of color. A blog post about Sriduangkaew's behavior by fellow writer Laura J. Mixon won Mixon the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. In reporting on her online activities, the Daily Dot wrote that it is not certain whether or not she is indeed a Thai writer, or whether Benjanun Sriduangkaew is a pseudonym or her real name.
In a blog post in 2015, Sriduangkaew wrote that she had become the target of harassment and cyberstalking campaigns after her Internet identities were revealed, while conceding that "I’ve been shitty in the past".