Tamsyn Muir Books in Order

If you want the main series: Gideon the Ninth → Harrow the Ninth → Nona the Ninth
If you want a shorter standalone: Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower
If you want more Locked Tomb after the novels: The Unwanted Guest
If you want a quick taste of her darker short fiction: Undercover

Tamsyn Muir was born in Australia and grew up mostly in Howick, New Zealand, with stretches in Waiuku and central Wellington. She writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror, but her work rarely stays politely in one lane. Her books like strange mixtures on purpose: swords and spaceships, body horror and bad jokes, grief and devotion, all pressed together until they click.

She has said she started writing young, long before publication was part of the plan. Fanfiction, games, and speculative fiction were a huge part of how she learned story, and one of her earliest writing memories involves Samurai Pizza Cats fanfiction written on Post-it notes. That mix of internet energy, deep genre reading, and playfulness still shows up in her fiction.

Teaching mattered too.

Muir studied education, then taught English and English as a second language. She has talked about how teaching forced her to look harder at her own sentences and story choices. A major turning point came in 2010, when she attended the Clarion Writers' Workshop. By her own account, Clarion helped her take herself seriously as a writer and gave her a stronger sense of story structure, not just style on the page.

Before the novels, she built her reputation in short fiction. Stories like The Deepwater Bride showed her taste for queer heroines, eerie settings, and horror that feels both intimate and a little grotesque. Her shorter work picked up nominations for the Nebula, Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy, and Eugie Foster awards, which gave readers a sense of what she could do before she ever published a novel.

Then came Gideon the Ninth in 2019.

That book changed the scale of her career. Gideon the Ninth introduced The Locked Tomb, a far-future saga of necromancers, cavaliers, murder puzzles, and very messy feelings, and it quickly found readers who liked their space opera funnier, bloodier, and much stranger. It won the Crawford Award and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. It was followed by Harrow the Ninth and Nona the Ninth, books that widen the canvas while digging even deeper into identity, memory, faith, and the cost of love.

She can also shift gears when she wants to. Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower takes fairy tale furniture, a trapped princess, a tower full of monsters, and the promise of rescue, then pulls the whole setup sideways. Readers who come to Muir for the Locked Tomb books often stay for the same reasons they pick up Floralinda: sharp humor, strange stakes, and heroines who have to improvise their way out of bad systems.

A lot of Muir's fiction returns to similar pressures. People are trapped by duty, by old bargains, by broken bodies, by gods, by institutions, or by the version of themselves other people need them to be. She likes isolated settings, decaying power structures, and characters who joke when they are scared. She also likes making readers work a little, which is part of the fun.

She now lives and works in Oxford, in the United Kingdom. Even after moving away from New Zealand, she has spoken about hearing her own Kiwi voice more clearly at a distance. That seems right for her books too: they are packed with faraway worlds, but they never feel rootless. However bizarre the setting gets, there is always a very human person underneath, trying to survive something impossible.