Shelfies #11: Cheryl Morgan

This is not part of my SF&F bookshelves. That would have felt far too much like picking favourites amongst many very good friends. And in any case I would have felt honour-bound to show all the books that Wizard’s Tower has published and talk about them, which would have been horribly cheesy of me. So instead I am giving you a look at some of my history books, a genre in which I know far fewer of the authors.

Back when I was co-hosting the Women’s Outlook show on Ujima radio in Bristol, word broke that one of the local universities had just appointed Britain’s first Black female professor of history. Obviously Ujima had to interview her, and I got the job. Olivette Otele and I bonded over our shared loves of Bob Marley and rugby (she’s French-Cameroonian and did her PhD at the Sorbonne, and she lives in Wales). African Europeans looks at people from Africa who played a major role in European history. I’m proud to have a mention in the Acknowledgements for her book.

I would have had to find Caroline Dodds-Pennock at some point, because historians who specialize in Meso-American history are thin on the ground in the UK. I needed someone who could tell me about ideas of gender amongst the Nahua (Aztecs). We became friends on Twitter before it became a Nazi Bar, and eventually met at HistFest. On Savage Shores is a wonderful book about people from the Americas who ended up traveling to Europe after Columbus had accidentally rocked up on their shores. Their opinions of our ancestors are enlightening.

I first met Sophus Helle at an Assyriology conference in Barcelona. He and several others kindly helped me in my research into gender diversity in the Ancient Near East. Sophus is an unusual Assyriologist in that he is also an expert in literature. His father is one of Denmark’s foremost poets. These twin skills make him the ideal person to tackle works such as Gilgamesh and the poems of Enheduanna. To understand ancient epics you have to be able to think like a poet, and also understand the culture from which that poet’s work arose.

You may well think that Sophus and Maria Davanha Headley should know each other, as they have a common interest in ancient epics. I know them both, and both have told me that they are keen to set up a meeting if only they can find the time. I look forward to seeing what comes of it.

I do not know Natalia Petrovskaia, but I wish I did. Perhaps I can get an introduction from Carolynne Larrington who does know her (and whose book on Norse myths is also on the shelf). Natalia’s book on the story of Peredur from The Mabinogion, This is Not a Grail Romance, is another fine example of the sort of thing Sophus does. The Mabinogion is pretty impenetrable, and many literary scholars just guess as to what the various parts of it mean. But Natalia has studied mediaeval Welsh history in search of clues, and it has paid off.

Kit Heyam is a star amongst trans historians, and another friend. Some of you may remember the BBC series, Versailles. After each episode there was a short documentary slot in which Greg Jenner and Kate Williams talked to specialist historians about what had been in the preceding drama. Kit got to talk about Louis XIV’s very queer brother, Philippe. That makes them the only trans historian to have talked about trans history on the BBC. Before We Were Trans is an excellent book that examines gender diversity in a variety of cultures, most of them non-European. As the title suggests, the book looks at how humans saw gender before European and American sexologists sought to codify their narrow view of what a trans person is.

And that will have to do, though I could go on at length about all of these books and more.

Cheryl Morgan is a writer, editor, and publisher. She is the winner of four Hugo Awards and is the owner of Wizard’s Tower Press. Her non-fiction has appeared in a variety of venues including Locus, the SFWA Bulletin, the Science Fiction Encyclopaedia, Vector and Strange Horizons. Her fiction has appeared in a number of small press magazines and anthologies. Cheryl was a Guest of Honour at the 2012 Eurocon in Zagreb and the 2019 Finncon in Jyväskylä. She was a keynote speaker at the Worlding SF academic conference at the University of Graz in 2018, and at When It Changed, an online conference on feminist science fiction organised by the University of Glasgow in December 2022. Some of the books mentioned above have been reviewed in her fanzine, Salon Futura.

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin. If you are interested in sharing a shelfie, please let us know.