Eating Authors: Mur Lafferty (Campbell Award nominee)

Welcome to the second of this year’s Campbell Award Nominee Eating Author segments.

Although not actually one of the Hugo Awards, the Campbell Award for Best New Writer is presented alongside them during the award ceremony at the World Science Fiction Convention (held this year in Chicago). And this month, courtesy of my blog, you get to know a little something extra about your Campbell nominees.

With us today is Mur Lafferty who was nominated in her first year of eligibility. Unless you’ve been living under a hearing-impaired rock, you’re probably familiar with her work audio work. Cory Doctorow is attributed as describing her as “the doyenne of scifi podcasting” presumably for her work on feeds such as I Should Be Writing (for which she won the Parsec Award in 2007), Pseudopod, Escape Pod, and Angry Robot Books Podcast.

Somehow, amidst all that podcasting about writing, introducing and reading other authors’ fiction, and just talking with authors, she finds the time to write herself. Her superhero novel, Playing for Keeps won her another Parsec Award in 2008, as did Wasteland, aka Heaven: Season Four of her Afterlife series. Several other works have also been nominated for Parsec Awards, including Marco and the Red Granny in 2011.

LMS: Welcome, Mur. Thanks for taking the time to talk about memorable meals.

ML: All of my best meals have been Japanese. There were two that were the most memorable: Over a decade ago, I got to go to Bond Street, a tiny, fancy sushi place in New York where we bought nearly everything on the menu. Fancy sake. Fresh grated wasabi. Succulent tuna belly. We ate far, far too much. The hangover the next day told me I drank too much, too. But damn, it was epic, and so worth it.

A close second was when I lucked into hanging out with influential bloggers at Blogworld in Las Vegas two years ago, and the MGM Grand wanted to send people to their restaurants to talk about it on social networks. I got into the Japanese restaurant – Shibuya – group, and we experienced a tasting menu that was amazing. Hundred year old sake, tuna tartar, sushi, yellowtail and truffle oil, every plate was amazing. I didn’t think I’d like the kind of meal that the chef chooses for you, but when the chef is a master, it’s usually safe to trust them.

It’s also the experiences attached to meals that make them stick in my mind. Taking quail egg shooters with friends (Yeah, Japanese food again, I know) at WorldCon Reno last year and eating fresh bread and cheese with my husband on our honeymoon in Spain also stick in my mind. The right company makes food taste better, and the food makes the memories stick.