Octavia E. Butler

Octavia Butler was the only child in a modest African-American family. Her mother was a housemaid and her father a shoeshine man, though he died when she was 7. As a child, Butler suffered from dyslexia and a crippling level of social anxiety, making her childhood both lonely and fraught with teasing. To compensate, Butler spent much of her free time in a local public library reading novels and magazines, and it was during this time that she fell in love with writing and storytelling. She started writing her own stories and convinced her mother to buy her a typewriter at the age of 10. During her college years, Butler continued to write prolifically but saw little success, working a variety of side jobs to keep herself afloat while maintaining a rigorous writing schedule. Her stories during this period were written in the mode of prominent science fiction at the time, with classic white male characters and simple premises. With the development of the Black Power Movement in the 1960 and 1970s as well as the national discussions about race and hierarchy at the time, Butler began writing more diverse characters and using her stories to critique existing power structures in gender, class, and ethnicity from her viewpoint of a black woman. Distinguishing herself with her perspective, Butler began selling short stories and novels, and by the late 1970s was able to support herself with writing full-time. In 1984 Butler she won her first Hugo Award for her short story “Speech Sounds.” The next year, “Bloodchild” won another Hugo. Over the next five years she wrote her popular Xenogenesis trilogy of novels, which she researched in the Amazon jungle. In the 1990s, following the publication of Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, she was awarded almost $300,000 by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the first science fiction author ever to receive the honor. In 2005, she was awarded a place in Chicago State University's International Black Writers Hall of Fame. Butler died suddenly of a stroke the following year at the young age of 58.