The City of Woven Streets

Emmi Elina Itäranta was born in 1976 in Finland. Itäranta holds a MA in Drama from the University of Tampere, and worked as a columnist, theatre critic, script writer and press officer after graduation. In 2007 she enrolled in the postgraduate program of University of Kent, where she began writing her debut novel as a part of her Creative Writing course work. Working simultaneously in English and her native Finnish, Itäranta completed both manuscripts, and in 2011 the Finnish version won the Fantasy and Sci-Fi Literary Fiction contest organised by the Finnish publishing house Teos.The novel was published by Teos in 2012 under the name Teemestarin kirja. The book won the Kalevi Jäntti Award in 2012, and the Nuori Aleksis Award in 2013. It was also shortlisted for the 2013 Tähtivaeltaja Award. The English version of the book, Memory of Water, was published by HarperCollins in 2014 in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. It has been nominated for the 2014 Philip K. Dick Award, as well as the Golden Tentacle Award. It was also nominated for the Arthur C Clarke Award for science fiction in 2015.

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