Genevieve Gornichec Books in Order

Genevieve Gornichec writes fantasy rooted in Norse myth, Viking Age history, and the lives of women who tend to get pushed to the edges of older stories. She earned a history degree from The Ohio State University, where studying Icelandic sagas and Norse mythology gave her a lasting direction for her fiction.

Her path to writing The Witch's Heart started with a college class and a question about several shadowy female figures in the myths. Gornichec became interested in Angrboda, the giantess and witch known chiefly as Loki's partner and the mother of several children tied to Ragnarok.

That question stuck.

In 2011, during National Novel Writing Month, she wrote the first draft of The Witch's Heart in three weeks. She was still an undergraduate, working in the early morning hours after finishing her other coursework, and she used the old myths as the framework for a story that gave Angrboda a fuller inner life.

The manuscript then had a long road ahead. Gornichec kept writing other projects, began querying The Witch's Heart years later, and eventually worked with an editor to reshape its second half and find an ending that could honor the source material without leaving readers in the bleakest possible place.

It took a decade for that first draft to become a published novel.

Released in 2021, The Witch's Heart follows Angrboda after Odin has punished her for refusing to reveal the future. In a remote forest, she builds a life with Loki and their children while prophecy keeps closing in. Readers who enjoy myth retellings often come to the book for the familiar gods and monsters, then stay for its focus on family, friendship, grief, and the hard work of choosing what to protect.

Her second novel, The Weaver and the Witch Queen, moves to tenth-century Norway. It centers on Oddny and Gunnhild, childhood friends bound by a blood oath, then separated by violence, ambition, magic, and the pull of history. The book draws on the saga traditions around Gunnhild, later remembered as a queen of Norway, while making room for ordinary women, close friendships, and the daily texture of a difficult world.

Gornichec has also written A Sheep Among Wolves, one of the three novellas in Walk Among Us, set in the World of Darkness of Vampire: The Masquerade. It is a very different setting from her novels, but it still shows her interest in people trying to find belonging when power, fear, and bad choices are all close at hand.

She lives in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work keeps returning to old material with new questions, especially about whose stories were left unfinished in the first place.