Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature created and hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week’s topic is top ten authors I read for the first time in 2015.

2015 has been a good year for me – I thought I might struggle to find a top ten that genuinely felt like newly favourite authors (rather than just authors I’d read for the first time), but in fact it’s been an opportunity to get all excited about the number of authors whose back catalogue (and future works) I now want to explore.

In no particular order, then:

• Aliette de Bodard – I fell for the Xuya short stories, and thoroughly enjoyed The House of Shattered Wings. I’m delighted she’s written so much short form fiction that can keep me going until book 2 comes out…
• Zen Cho – again, I fell for this lady’s short stories (Spirits Abroad will be a contender for my top ten best of 2015) and giggled through her debut novel Sorcerer to the Crown. I’m very sad that her Cyberpunk anthology is hard to get hold of in the UK…

• Becky Chambers – A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (another top ten of 2015 contender) stole my heart and took it across the galaxy to have adventures. More please 🙂

• Mary Gentle – no excuses for not having explored Gentle previously, but I finally got introduced during a read-along of the Orthe books (Golden Witchbreed / Ancient Light) organised by @sandstone78 over on LibraryThing. I shall be looking up her other works for sure. 

• Barbara Hambly – late to the party again, and I chose her Darwath portal fantasy trilogy (The Time of the Dark / The Walls of Air / The Armies of Daylight). I loved her prose and plot development, and I’m quite excited to go find her vampire hunter series next year…

• Elizabeth Bear – I’d been following Ms Bear’s blog long before I got round to reading any of her work, but this year saw me catch both Blood and Iron (I do like an author that does properly dangerous faeries) and some of her short form fiction. It was all fabulous, and I now have Dust sat on my shelf begging for my attention.

• James Smythe – I do read male authors too, honest! And I found James Smythe’s Anomaly books to be the sort that I liked well enough at the time and even more in retrospect. I’m all impatient for book 3, and may well have to acquire the rest of his back catalogue in the meantime…

• Rosemary Kirstein – it took me a couple of attempts to get on board with The Steerswoman, but I really enjoyed it once I found my feet.

• Sarah Lotz – I really enjoyed The Three (even if I think it should have finished a chapter earlier) and have no doubt I’ll be back for more of her slightly disturbing thrillers. 

• Apex – gets the final spot, which I know is a total cheat. However, I really enjoyed their 4th collection of World SF, and am really looking forward to catching up on the 3rd, which they kindly sent me a couple of weeks ago. The sheer diversity of the authors and their ideas is overwhelming (in a very very good way), so I can’t wait to dive back in for more.