Eleanor Arnason

Eleanor Arnason is an American science-fiction writer, born in 1942 in New York City. She published her first story in 1973 and worked for decades in nonprofit administration before retiring in 2009 to write full-time, later shifting her focus mainly toward short fiction. Her best-known novel, A Woman of the Iron People (1991), and its related Hwarhath sequence, including Ring of Swords (1993), explore contact and conflict between humans and a warlike, matriarchal alien species, examining gender and sexuality through anthropological science fiction in the tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin. She also writes the Lydia Duluth stories. Arnason won the inaugural James Tiptree Jr. Award in 1991 and the Mythopoeic Award in 1992, along with a Gaylactic Spectrum Award and two Nebula Award nominations.