Tor.com Publishing is proud to announce that consulting editor Ellen Datlow has acquired Ormeshadow, an historical novella by Priya Sharma about a farming family, the Belmans; of their estrangements, jealousies, adultery, abuse, and suicide, as seen through the eyes of Gideon Belman from childhood to young man. The Belman fabled fortune and personal myths are rooted in the Orme, land named from the Norse word dragon. The Orme legends become a cornerstone for Gideon when he loses everything that he loves.
Said Priya Sharma:
Ormeshadow has been with me for the last ten years in one form or another, so my thanks to Ellen Datlow and Tor.com Publishing taking it. It was inspired by the Great Orme, a limestone headland in Llandudno, North Wales, UK, and by the work of Thomas Hardy. Family is a theme that I return to again and again, because family is the start of all our stories, be it in their absence or presence, their love and cruelty, their well meaning mistakes and the intentional unkindnesses. Family make us and break us. Ormeshadow is a story about exactly that.
Said acquiring editor Ellen Datlow:
I’ve been following Priya’s evolution as a writer for several years now, and have been lucky enough to have acquired and edited or reprinted some of her brilliant stories. This is the first novella of hers I’ve read I and the whole Tor.Publishing team were blown away by its passion and atmospheric power. We believe readers will be, too.
Priya Sharma’s fiction has appeared in Interzone, Black Static, Nightmare, The Dark and Tor.com. She’s been anthologised in several of Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year series, Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror series, Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014, Steve Haynes’ Best British Fantasy 2014, and Johnny Main’s Best British Horror 2015. She’s also been on many Locus’ Recommended Reading Lists. “Fabulous Beasts” was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. She is a Grand Judge for the Aeon Award, an annual writing competition run by Albedo One, Ireland’s longest-running and foremost magazine of the Fantastic. A collection of some of Priya’s work, All the Fabulous Beasts, was released in 2018 from Undertow Publications. You can find her website here.
