2017 Compton Crook Award: Ada Palmer

Ada Palmer photo

Ada Palmer grew up in Annapolis MD and attended the Key School, then the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore. Ada Palmer is the 2017 Compton Crook winner for her first science fiction novel Too Like the Lightning (just released by Tor Books, 2016), a tale of global politics in the year 2454. She recently won the 2017 John Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She is an historian of the Renaissance, Enlightenment, classical reception, the history of books, publication and reading, and the history of philosophy, heresy, science and atheism. She teaches in the History Department at the University of Chicago, and researches in Italy, often in Florence or at the Vatican Library. She is the composer for Sassafrass, an a cappella group performing fantasy, SF and mythology-themed music, and her Viking musical play “Sundown: Whispers of Ragnarok” came out on CD and DVD in 2015. She researches anime/manga, especially Osamu Tezuka, early post-WWII manga and gender in manga. She has published on the history of manga and worked as a consultant for many anime and manga publishers. She writes the philosophy & travel blog ExUrbe.com.