Steven Price Books in Order

Steven Price grew up in Colwood, British Columbia, near Victoria. He studied writing at the University of Victoria, earning a BFA in 2000, then went to the University of Virginia for an MFA in poetry. Those early years gave him a home in both poetry and fiction, two forms he has continued to move between throughout his career.

His first book was Anatomy of Keys, a 2006 poetry collection built around the life and legend of Harry Houdini. Rather than offering a straightforward biography, it uses Houdini's escapes, family life, scepticism, and hunger for performance to ask larger questions about identity and belief. The book won the Gerald Lampert Award for a first collection.

Then came Omens in the Year of the Ox, another collection of poems, published in 2012. It ranges through history, mythology, childhood, superstition, and private unease, with a recurring chorus of strange, half-ghostly voices. It later received the ReLit Award for poetry.

Price's move into novels did not mean leaving poetry behind. His fiction often carries the same interest in memory, loss, moral pressure, and people trying to make sense of a world that has suddenly become unfamiliar.

His first novel, Into That Darkness, imagines a catastrophic earthquake striking Victoria. Price began thinking about the book while in graduate school in Virginia, after the attacks of September 11, 2001 made disaster feel newly close. The novel follows survivors through a broken city, but its real concern is what people owe one another when normal rules have fallen apart.

Place matters in his work.

With By Gaslight, Price travelled to Victorian London for a sprawling mystery involving detective William Pinkerton, the elusive criminal Edward Shade, and Adam Foole, a man pursued by an old love and an uncertain past. The book moves through foggy streets, drawing rooms, sewers, and séance parlours, while also reaching back to the American Civil War and South Africa. It was longlisted for the 2016 Giller Prize.

His 2019 novel Lampedusa takes a quieter but no less intense route. Set in 1950s Sicily, it imagines the final years of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa as he works on The Leopard while illness, family history, and the end of an old social world press in on him. The novel was shortlisted for the 2019 Giller Prize.

Price also writes dark historical fantasy as J.M. Miro. Under that name, he began the Talents Trilogy with Ordinary Monsters, followed by Bringer of Dust. These books follow gifted children in an alternate Victorian world where unusual powers can bring danger as easily as refuge. The change of name suits a change of shelf, but the familiar concerns remain: outsiders, haunted places, hidden histories, and the fragile work of finding people who will stand beside you.

He lives in Victoria with his wife, novelist Esi Edugyan, and their family, and has taught poetry and fiction at the University of Victoria. Across poems, historical novels, disaster fiction, and fantasy, Price keeps returning to characters under pressure, trying to choose decency when the world gives them very little room.