Natalie Zina Walschots is a writer and game designer. She is the Author of Hench, a novel about the mistreated and undervalued employees of supervillains, and is currently at work on the sequel. Hench was a finalist on the 2021 season of Canada Reads and was nominated for a Locus Award for Best First Novel. Her work also includes LARP scripts, heavy metal music journalism, video game lore, and weirder things classified as “interactive experiences.” Her writing on the interactive adventure The Aluminum Cat won an IndieCade award, and her poetic exploration of the notes engine in Bloodborne was featured in Kotaku and First Person Scholar. She is (unfortunately) the author of two books of poetry: Thumbscrews, which won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and DOOM: Love Poems for Supervillains. Natalie plays a lot of TTRPGs, participates in a lot of Nordic LARPs, watches a lot of horror movies and reads a lot of speculative fiction. She lives in Toronto with her partner, several cats and a jumping spider.
