Giants at the End of the World
Leena Likitalo
Trevor Smith
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Leena Likitalo hails from Finland, the land of endless summer days and long, dark winter nights. She lives with her husband on an island at the outskirts of Helsinki, the capital. But regardless of her remote location, stories find their way to her and demand to be told.
While growing up, Leena struggled to learn foreign languages. At sixteen, her father urged her to begin reading in English, and thus she spent the next summer wading through his collection of fantasy and science fiction novels. She has fond memories of her “teachers”: J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Jordan, Roger Zelazny and Vernor Vinge.
Leena breaks computer games for a living.
When she’s not working, she writes obsessively. And when she’s not writing, she can be found at the stables riding horses or at the pool playing underwater rugby.
Her Writers of the Future win is her third professional sale, her fiction having appeared in Weird Tales, Waylines, and semipro publications. She has recently finished writing a steampunk novel around her winning short story. She dreams—and oh, how sweet those dreams are!—of seeing it in print one day.
Leena’s first-place story is among those that will be competing for the annual grand prize, the L. Ron Hubbard Golden Pen Award.
You can visit her online at: leenalikitalo.com.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Trevor Smith has happily lived in the desert of Tucson, Arizona, most of his life, except for five years living in San Francisco while attending art school.
Loving art school but not the city he lived in, he came back to Tucson with all of the skills he needed to begin a freelance career in illustration and fine art oil painting.
His illustration degree focused on digital painting, which he uses to bring fantasy and sci-fi stories to life.
Simultaneously, Trevor is oil painting, but on entirely different subject matter. Instead of painting otherworldly subjects, he is inspired by the beauty that he sees around him. This can vary from grungy cityscapes to the pastel colors in the clouds above a landscape. Recently, even graphic cubism has ignited new inspiration.
With such a zeal for learning and sharing his creativity, Trevor revels in the fact that he will never run out of inspiration or ways to expand his art spirit. Perhaps 2014 will be the year for him to make his mark on others—whether through a peculiar cubist piece, or an evocative scene of an alien planet.
You can see everything Trevor is up to on his blog: TrevorSmithArt.blogspot.com.