Brian Attebery (born December 1951) is an American writer and emeritus professor of English and philosophy at Idaho State University. He is known for his studies of fantasy literature, including The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin (1980) and Strategies of Fantasy (1992) which won the Mythopoeic Award. Attebery is also editor of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, for which he received the World Fantasy Award in 2021. He has also won the IAFA Award for distinguished scholarship and the Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement.

Biography

Attebery was born in December 1951, and received a doctorate in American Civilization from Brown University in 1979. He is professor of English at Idaho State University, and the editor of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. He is known for his non-fiction works on fantasy literature, such as the 1980 book The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin and the 1992 book Strategies of Fantasy. Attebery suggests that fantasy is a "fuzzy set" with no easily discernible boundaries, in contrast to the genre of science fiction. Critic John Clute has praised the book as displaying "very considerable [...] critical acumen". He retired from Idaho State University in April 2022 and was named an emeritus professor in the Department of English and Philosophy. In 2022 Brian Attebery won the Mythopoeic Award (given by the Mythopoeic Society) for his book Fantasy: How It Works (OUP).

Recognition

Career awards

Attebery is the recipient of the 1993 IAFA Award for Distinguished Scholarship, and the 2009 Pilgrim Award for lifetime contribution to SF and fantasy scholarship.

Individual works

He has won the Mythopoeic Award and World Fantasy Award for individual works of nonfiction, as detailed in the following table.

Works

Short fiction

Non-fiction

Anthologies as editor

Essays