Anna Abed

Long Biography

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Anna Abed (she/her) got her first taste of storytelling from her grandmother, an Iraqi-Jewish woman who understood that in Iraqi tradition, the story itself is only the skeleton—the real flesh and blood is in the telling. It's no coincidence that in A Thousand and One Nights, the hero isn't a warrior but a storyteller. A young woman named Scheherazade who must spin a new tale each night to survive until dawn. It was the first lesson Anna ever learned: a well-told story can hold even death at the door.

Anna spent her childhood in France, which gave her a lifelong obsession with French history and the strong opinion that no fictional world is complete until you know what the characters are eating.

 

She earned her Ph.D. in computational chemistry, and it was during her thesis work that she picked up Frankenstein (fitting reading material, considering the protagonist is also a chemist trying to reanimate the dead.) Somewhere between her equations and Shelley's reanimated corpse, the idea took hold: what if Victor Frankenstein's experiments had succeeded? What if reanimation became so reliable you could build an empire on it?

 

Anna’s fiction also draws on her experience with OCD. She grew up watching her grandmother knock three times on wood to ward off Ayin ha-Ra (the Evil Eye), and her brain apparently thought “this seems like a reasonable thing to make mandatory forever.” She developed rituals around the number three and hid them for years out of embarrassment, but she’s talking about them now. Maybe someone else will read this and feel less alone in knowing what it’s like when your own mind holds you captive (and won’t let you leave a room until you’ve touched the doorknob the exact right number of times).

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She lives in Portland, Oregon, where the rain provides a convenient excuse to stay indoors and write.