Sarah A. Hoyt

Sarah A. Hoyt (born November 18, 1962) is a Portuguese-born American immigrant science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and historical fiction writer. She won the 2011 Prometheus Award for Best Libertarian SF Novel for her science fiction novel Darkship Thieves, and the 2018 Dragon Award for Best Alternate History Novel for Uncharted, which she co-authored with Kevin J. Anderson. She has written under the noms de plume Sarah D'Almeida, Elise Hyatt, Sarah Marques, Laurien Gardner, and Sarah Marques de Almeida Hoyt. She was the leader of the Sad Puppies campaign in the year that it ceased nominating candidates.

Biography Sarah de Almeida was born on November 18, 1962, in the village of Granja, Águas Santas, Maia and grew up in Porto, Portugal. Educated in both Portugal and the United States, she graduated from University of Porto, with a Master's equivalent in Modern Languages and Literatures with a major in English and a minor in German. She also speaks Swedish, Italian and French, with varying degrees of fluency. Married in 1985 to Dan Hoyt (a science fiction author and mathematician), she has two sons. She became a United States citizen in 1988 in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Writing Hoyt says "no genre is safe from me". She has more than 30 novels in science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and historical. The first book in her Shakespearean fantasy series, Ill Met by Moonlight was a finalist for the 2002 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award.

Her Musketeers series begins with Death of a Musketeer, a Mystery Book Club selection, and includes three other titles from Berkley Prime Crime.

Her favorite genre, however, remains science fiction, and Hoyt is a prolific writer. Her short stories are in Analog, Asimov's, Weird Tales, and anthologies from DAW and Baen. Her shapeshifter series include Draw One in the Dark and Gentleman Takes a Chance, urban fantasy adventures, from Baen Books. Also from Baen Books is her Darkship series beginning with Darkship Thieves, winner of the Prometheus Award for libertarian science fiction.

The British Empire series takes place in a parallel world, where history from Charlemagne to Queen Victoria parallels ours but is actuated through the workings of magic and not by science and technology. The series consists of three books: Heart of Light, set in Victorian Africa; Soul of Fire unfolds in India; and Heart and Soul in the chaos of 19th century China.

Under the house name Laurien Gardner, she has Plain Jane for Jove Books Historical Fiction. She also edited the anthology Something Magic This Way Comes.

She has a series of mysteries centered on furniture re-finishing under the pen name Elise Hyatt. These stories are set in the same city of Goldport, Colorado as her shifter series, with some characters appearing in both series.

Her novel Uncharted with Kevin J. Anderson won the Dragon Awards for Best Alternate History Novel in 2018. A review in Locus described it as "filled with not only slambang adventures but also a kind of rational optimism... rare in genre works these days."

More recently, she was featured on a podcast, The Future and You. Produced by Stephen Euin Cobb, the show featured Sarah de Almeida Hoyt, David Drake, Alan Dean Foster, Travis Taylor, and Stephen L Antczak. She was Guest of Honor at the 2019 LibertyCon.

Hoyt is a regular contributor to the Instapundit blog and The Libertarian Enterprise (ncc-1776.org).