By day, Livia Llewellyn works as an administrative assistant in the legal department at a publishing company. By night, she is a writer of dark fantasy, horror, and erotica, whose short fiction has appeared in more than 80 anthologies and magazines.
This past week, Mystery Writers of America announced Llewellyn as the winner of the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Short Story for “One of These Nights,” from Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers. The 74th annual Edgar Allan Poe Awards, traditionally presented at a banquet, were announced on April 30.
Llewellyn grew up Tacoma, Washington and moved to Manhattan in the 1990s where, while working for a publishing firm, she briefly did stage acting and what she called “several really terrible movies.” She moved to Jersey City in 2002 after her employer, Wiley and Sons Publishing, moved to Hoboken.
“I know that some people joke that this part of New Jersey is like part of Manhattan, but it’s really not," she says. "It’s more open and car owner-oriented. I mean Downtown has seen more skyscrapers go up, but you can still move around and breathe. Being from Tacoma, where everything is more spread out, that was perfect for me.”
“One of These Nights” is a short story about a teenage girl who helps her best friend confront a third girl who is believed to be sleeping with the best friend’s father, and the punishment that they set into motion. The story takes place during one late summer afternoon at a public swimming pool in 1970s Tacoma.
The seeds to Llewellyn’s writing career were planted when she moved to New York and bought her first computer, and discovered personal websites on which people published their own stories.
“I started playing with hypertext fiction online and although I never published anything at first, it was a way for me to experiment on my own,” she says. “Around 2002 or 2003, I was on these places like LifeJournal and I started meeting people that were real writers. I was reading their work and that’s when I finally thought to myself that I could do this.”
When writing her stories, the title and maybe an image or two from her past, or even the influence of her surroundings come to mind when the creative process begins. Sometimes she’ll write something from start to finish, or the ending comes first.
“While ‘One of These Nights’ does have these moments that take place during the summer nights that were very similar to my own experiences, not the murder itself of course, but things that I remember that could be translated into a story,” she says. “From there I just have to think about it for a while, and there needs to be not just a beginning or an idea, but an actual end."
Llewellyn’s influences extend beyond horror writers. Aside from writers like Laird Barron or Caitlín Kiernan, the works of Georges Bataille, Paul Verlaine and Jack Kerouac also serve to inspire.
Her collections, Engines of Desire (2011, Lethe Press) and Furnace (2016, Word Horde Press), have both received Shirley Jackson Award nominations for Best Collection, and Furnace won the 2016 This is Horror Award for Best Collection.
More about Llewellyn and her work can be found at liviallewellyn.com.
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