Award-Winning Author Amal El-Mohtar Calls Ottawa Home
Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award recipient returns to the city that shaped her speculative fiction career.
Amal El-Mohtar has won some of the most prestigious awards in science fiction—Hugo, Nebula, Aurora, Locus—yet she keeps returning to Ottawa, the city where her creative voice took root.
El-Mohtar recently completed a two-month book tour promoting her latest work, Seasons of Glass and Iron, a collection of short stories and poetry spanning fifteen years. But when the tour ends, she comes back here. "I think of it as so much a part of who I am, to be from here, to love this city, and to have had so many of my interests and enthusiasms kind of grow here and be supported here," she said.
For a writer working in speculative fiction—a genre that often demands the full architecture of imagined worlds—having a home city matters. Ottawa isn't just where El-Mohtar grew up; it's where early readers, teachers, and the local literary community nurtured her ambitions. That sense of belonging, of being rooted even as her imagination spans galaxies and centuries, shapes how she writes.
Her collection draws on decades of short-form work, mixing the fantastical with the deeply personal. Each story and poem reflects the kind of careful, layered thinking that comes from having time and space to develop ideas—the kind of stability a home city provides.
El-Mohtar's success and her deliberate choice to remain connected to Ottawa offers a quiet reminder: the city's role as a creative incubator often goes unnoticed, overshadowed by government and tech stories. Yet it's here that award-winning voices are shaped.