Natalie Zina Walschots Books in Order

Natalie Zina Walschots is a Canadian writer whose work moves easily between poetry, fiction, journalism, game writing, and interactive storytelling. Her books often make room for people who are usually pushed to the edge of the frame, including disposable employees, comic-book villains, and characters living with the real consequences of violence.

She grew up in Amherstburg, a small town in southern Ontario. Walschots later studied in Windsor before moving to Calgary for a master's degree in English and creative writing at the University of Calgary.

Writing came early. As a teenager, she wrote fan fiction, a practice she has described as an important way of learning how fiction works. In her early twenties, poetry was the form that fit what she wanted to explore, especially questions of language, sex, power, and discomfort.

Her first collection, Thumbscrews, was published in 2007 after winning the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. The book uses short, tightly shaped poems to examine consensual pain, desire, and the pressure that rules and constraints can put on language.

Then came supervillains.

In DOOM: Love Poems for Supervillains, Walschots turns her attention to comic-book antagonists. The poems are playful, erotic, nerdy, and sometimes deliberately unsettling. She researched each character's history and powers, then let those details shape the vocabulary and sound of the poem.

Before publishing her first novel, Walschots built a wide-ranging writing life. She worked in music journalism and freelance nonfiction, wrote about subjects from heavy metal to games, and did professional narrative and dialogue work for video games. That mix of reporting, systems thinking, and pop-culture curiosity feeds directly into her fiction.

Her 2020 novel Hench follows Anna Tromedlov, a temporary worker for supervillains whose life is upended by a superhero's so-called rescue. It asks what heroism looks like to the people left injured, unemployed, or ignored after the big fight. The book combines workplace frustration, data analysis, disability, anger, and superhero spectacle, while keeping its focus on Anna's sharp, increasingly ruthless point of view. It was a finalist in the 2021 season of Canada Reads and was nominated for the Locus Award for Best First Novel.

The sequel, Villain, returns to Anna after she has become known as the Auditor and risen within the world of supervillain work. Across the series, Walschots is interested in labor, loyalty, public relations, and the slippery line between a hero's story and a villain's story. There are spreadsheets, office politics, bad bosses, and plenty of reasons to question the official version of events.

She still works across media, developing characters, communities, games, and interactive narratives. Walschots now lives in Nova Scotia with her partner and four cats. The cats, presumably, are not available for comment.