Madeline Ashby grew up in a household populated by science fiction fans. After meeting Ursula K. Le Guin in the basement of the Elliott Bay Book Company that year, she decided to start writing science fiction stories. While immigrating to Canada from the United States in 2006 , she joined the Cecil Street Irregulars - a genre writers' workshop founded by Judith Merril. Since then she has been published in Tesseracts, Flurb, Nature, Escape Pod and elsewhere. She has a masters degree in Manga and Anime and writes on such matters for io9, Tor.com and Boing Boing. Currently she works as a strategic foresight consultant in Toronto. She is also a regular columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and the author of Company Town.