Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Thomas Olde Heuvelt (born 16 April 1983) is a Dutch horror writer. His short stories have received the Hugo Award for Best Novelette, the Dutch Paul Harland Prize, and have been nominated for two additional Hugo Awards and a World Fantasy Award.

Early life and influences

Olde Heuvelt was born in Nijmegen, Netherlands. He studied English and American literature at the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen and at the University of Ottawa in Canada, where he lived for half a year. In many interviews, he recalls that the literary heroes of his childhood were Roald Dahl and Stephen King, who created in him a love for grim and dark fiction. He later discovered the works of a wider range of contemporary writers such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Neil Gaiman, and Yann Martel, whom he calls his greatest influences.

Career

Olde Heuvelt wrote his debut novel, De Onvoorziene, at the age of nineteen. It was published with a small printing in 2002 and followed in 2004 by PhantasAmnesia, a 600-page novel in which the author combined horror with humor and satire. Since 2008, his novels have been published by major Dutch publishing house Luitingh-Sijthoff.

Olde Heuvelt is a multiple winner of the Paul Harland Prize for best Dutch work of fantastic fiction (2009 and 2012). Translated into English, his short story "The Boy Who Cast No Shadow", published by PS Publishing in the UK, was nominated for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards in 2012. The same story was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2013.

In April 2013, Tor Books released his story "The Ink Readers of Doi Saket" as an e-book. It would be nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story and the World Fantasy Award—Short Fiction in 2014.