Siobhan Carroll Books in Order

Siobhan Carroll is a Canadian writer and English professor whose work moves between Romantic-era British literature and speculative fiction. Raised in Vancouver, she later moved to the United States for graduate study at Indiana University Bloomington, where she completed a PhD in English in 2005.

In 2008, Carroll joined the University of Delaware faculty. Her academic focus is British literature from 1750 to 1850, a period often called the Romantic Century, along with modern science fiction and fantasy. Her teaching and research return often to empire, nationalism, the natural world, and the stories people tell about unfamiliar places.

Her nonfiction book, An Empire of Air and Water, was published in 2015. It looks at places that resisted easy settlement or control, including the poles, oceans, atmosphere, and underground spaces, and asks how British writers imagined them during an age of imperial expansion.

Geography is never merely background in her work.

In the book, Carroll brings together poetry, fiction, newspapers, and voyage narratives. She considers writers including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Sophia Lee, and Charles Dickens, tracing how their work turned distant or dangerous environments into sites of fear, possibility, and national argument. An Empire of Air and Water was a runner-up for the British Association for Romantic Studies First Book Prize.

Alongside her scholarship, Carroll writes short speculative fiction. Her stories have appeared in magazines including Lightspeed and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and include In the Gardens of the Night, The Year of Silent Birds, and The War of Light and Shadow, in Five Dishes. These stories often use invented worlds, folklore, ghosts, or magic to put pressure on questions of power, loyalty, history, and survival.

Her best-known fiction is For He Can Creep, a darkly funny historical fantasy about the poet Christopher Smart, his cat Jeoffry, and a visit from Satan. The story lets a proud, sharp-clawed cat take the lead in a fight over a human soul and the fate of the world. It won the 2020 Eugie Foster Memorial Award and was also a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Locus awards.

It later became an animated episode of Love, Death & Robots.

Carroll's academic and creative work have a clear meeting point. She is drawn to the ways old texts, strange landscapes, and supernatural premises can reveal what people fear, desire, and try to control. Her university work has also included a project on environmental agency in the nineteenth-century Anthropocene.

Whether she is writing criticism or fantasy, Carroll makes room for big ideas and odd details, including cats who know more about demons than their humans do.