Gemma Files

Gemma Files is a Canadian horror writer, journalist, and film critic. Her short story, "The Emperor's Old Bones", won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Story of 1999. Five of her short stories were adapted for the television series The Hunger.

Biography Gemma Files was born in 1968 in London to the actors Elva Mai Hoover and Gary Files. Her family relocated to Toronto in 1969. Files graduated from Ryerson Polytechnic University in 1991 with a degree in journalism. She published her first horror fiction, "Fly-by-Night" in 1993. Various freelance assignments eventually led to a continuing position with entertainment periodical Eye Weekly, where she wrote about the horror genre, independent films and Canadian cinema. She was listed by Cameron Bailey of NOW as one of the Top 10 Coolest People in Canadian Cinema for 1996.

In 2000 her award-winning story "The Emperor's Old Bones" was reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Thirteenth Annual Collection (ed. Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow). In 2010 her Shirley Jackson Award-nominated novelette "each thing i show you is a piece of my death" was reprinted in The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Two (ed. Ellen Datlow). Her short story "The Jacaranda Smile" was also a 2009 Shirley Jackson Award finalist.

Her first novel, A Book of Tongues, won the 2010 Black Quill Award for "Best Small Press Chill" from Dark Scribe Magazine; it was followed by the sequels A Rope of Thorns (2011) and A Tree of Bones (2012), together comprising her The Hexslinger series. A Rope of Thorns was considered a "powerful sequel" to A Book of Tongues by Publishers Weekly.

Her book We Will All Go Down Together (about a coven of witches and changelings) was given a favorable review by NPR.

Her novel Experimental Film (2015) won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the Sunburst Award for Best Canadian Speculative Fiction (Novel) in 2016.

Files married science fiction and fantasy author Stephen J. Barringer (with whom she co-wrote "'each thing i show you is a piece of my death"") in 2002.

Collections

Poetry