Paolo Tadini Bacigalupi (born August 6, 1972) is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, John W. Campbell Memorial, Compton Crook, Theodore Sturgeon, and Michael L. Printz awards, and has been nominated for the National Book Award. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction, and the environmental journal High Country News. Nonfiction essays of his have appeared in Salon.com and High Country News, and have been syndicated in newspapers, including the Idaho Statesman, the Albuquerque Journal, and The Salt Lake Tribune.

Early life

Bacigalupi was born in Paonia, Colorado. He graduated from Oberlin College with a major in East Asian Studies.

Career

Bacigalupi's short fiction has been collected in the anthology Pump Six and Other Stories (Night Shade Books, 2008). His debut novel The Windup Girl, also published by Night Shade Books in September 2009, won the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards in 2010. The Windup Girl was also named by Time as one of the "Top 10 Books of 2009". Ship Breaker, published by Little, Brown and Company in 2010, was awarded the Michael L. Printz Award for the "best book written for teens", and was nominated for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.

Themes

The Windup Girl, along with many of his short stories, explores the effects of bioengineering and a world in which fossil fuels are no longer viable. Bioengineering has ravaged the world with food-borne plagues, produced tailored organisms as mimics to both cats and humans, and replaced today's fossil-fuel reliant engines with muscle power, whether human or engineered animal. Energy storage is accomplished through the use of high-capacity springs, as well as simply transporting food to feed either megodonts (bioengineered elephants) or human laborers. His writing deals with the ethics and possible ramifications of genetic engineering and western dominance, as well as the nature of humanity and a world in which, despite drastic changes, people remain essentially the same. Similar themes run through his book The Water Knife (2015), where a future American Southwest is reduced to a dystopian Dust Bowl where water is a guarded commodity for the wealthy and powerful interests.

Awards and nominations

Novels

Young adult

Younger readers

Novellas

Collections

Short stories

"collected in Pump Six and Other Stories original to Pump Six and Other Stories"

Audiobooks