Ray Nayler

Ray Nayler was born in Quebec, Canada, and holds American and Canadian citizenship. He studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz, earned a master's at SOAS in London and a PhD at the University of Essex.

His career outside of writing is almost as interesting as his books. He served in the Peace Corps and became a U.S. Foreign Service officer, posted in Russia, Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Balkans. He was press attaché at the embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, and handled environment, science, technology and health at the consulate in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He was also an international advisor at NOAA's Marine Protected Areas Center and a visiting scholar at George Washington University, working on science and space policy.

In fiction, he started with short stories. The first, "Mutability," ran in Asimov's in 2015. More followed in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed and Nightmare, some of them leaning into horror. In 2023 Tor.com published "The Job at the End of the World."

His first novel, The Mountain in the Sea (2022), shows what drives him. On an archipelago off Vietnam, a scientist studies octopuses that may have built a language and a culture. It won the Locus Award for Best First Novel and was a Nebula finalist.

The Tusks of Extinction (2024) works the same territory. Cloned mammoths roam a Siberian reserve, and the uploaded mind of an elephant expert has to teach the herd how to survive. The novella won the 2025 Hugo for Best Novella at the Worldcon in Seattle.

Next came Where the Axe Is Buried (2025), a near-future thriller, and Palaces of the Crow (2026). The diplomat and the ocean policy man come through in every book: technology, power and conservation are tangled together, and the underlying question is usually what it would take to talk with a mind that isn't human.