Grudova, Camilla
Entry updated 4 March 2024. Tagged: Author.
(? - ) Canadian author, in Scotland for some years, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Agata's Machine" in The White Review for June 2015. Much of her early work, whose abrupt surreal destabilizations of normative reality have evoked comparisons with the short stories of both Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter, was assembled as The Doll's Alphabet (coll 2017); her use of Fantastika can be seen as weaponized to convey lessons (see Feminism; Women in SF). The surreal Satire of an unnamed but deeply unmistakable Alternate-World vision of Britain in "Through Ceilings and Walls" from The Coiled Serpent (coll of linked stories 2023) also demonstrates a savage deftness with contemporary topoi.
Grudova's first novel, Children of Paradise (2022), is set in the ancient, baroque but purpose-built Paradise cinema in an abstract Edinburgh; carnivalesque encounters, and extremely detailed irradiations of the history of Cinema, generate a sense that the Zone inhabited by the large cast of the tale can almost be seen as a stage. But the world outside the text cruelly commodifies – as must be expected – anything organic in this polder. [JC]
Camilla Grudova
born Canada
works
- Children of Paradise (London: Atlantic Books, 2022) [hb/]
collections and stories
- The Doll's Alphabet (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017) [coll: pb/nonpictorial]
- Ghost Bread (New York: Tor Nightfire, 2021) [story: ebook: na/]
- The Coiled Serpent (London: Atlantic Books, 2023) [coll of linked stories: hb/]
links
previous versions of this entry