Tanya Huff(I)
- Writer
- Additional Crew
Tanya Sue Huff (born 1957) is a Canadian fantasy author. Her stories
have been published since the late 1980s, including five fantasy series
and one science-fiction series. One of these, her Blood Books series,
featuring detective Vicki Nelson, was adapted for television under the
title Blood Ties. Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Huff was raised in
Kingston, Ontario. Her first sale as a writer was to The Picton Gazette
when she was ten. They paid $10 for two of her poems. Huff joined the
Canadian Naval Reserve in 1975 as a cook, ending her service in 1979.
In 1982 she received a Bachelor of Applied Arts degree in Radio and
Television Arts from Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto,
Ontario; she was in the same class as noted science-fiction writer
Robert J. Sawyer; they collaborated on their final TV Studio Lab
assignment, a short science-fiction show. In the early 1980s she worked
at Mr. Gameway's Ark, a game store in Downtown Toronto. From 1984 to
1992 she worked at Bakka, North America's oldest surviving science
fiction book store, in Toronto. During this time she wrote seven novels
and nine short stories, many of which were subsequently published. She
was a member of the Bunch of Seven writing group. In 1992, after living
for 13 years in downtown Toronto, she moved with her four large cats to
rural Ontario, where she resides with her wife, fellow fantasy writer
Fiona Patton. Her current pet population consists of six cats and what
she describes as an "unintentional chihuahua". Huff is one of the most
prominent Canadian authors in the category of contemporary fantasy, a
subgenre pioneered by Charles de Lint. Many of the scenes in her
stories are near places where she has lived or frequented in Toronto,
Kingston, and elsewhere. This author frequently uses as character names
the names of people in her circle of acquaintances. A prolific author,
she has written everything from horror to romantic fantasy to
contemporary fantasy to humour to space opera. She appeared in a 2009
documentary Pretty Bloody: The Women of Horror.
