Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service, with me, Alex Collins.

This week we're telling stories about women's history, and today we'll hear about the

life of Octavia Butler, one of the first African American women to successfully write

science fiction. I've been speaking to one of her closest friends.

It's 1995 and Octavia Butler has found out that she has won a MacArthur Genius Award

of over a quarter of a million dollars, given out to pioneers in their field of work.

Octavia was the first science fiction author to receive that award, so she was representing

not just her ethnicity and not just her gender, but the genre.

That's all the nitty-sale. Sounds like it was a moment of triumph on several fronts, but

it wasn't easy for Octavia to reach these heights, especially in her early years when

there wasn't much money around. Octavia was born in 1947 in Pasadena, Southern California,

and spent her early years living on a dusty chicken ranch which had no running water.

She was dyslexic, but she loved reading, however, her family couldn't afford to buy her

any books.

A lot of the books that Octavia was entertained by were basically castoffs from the families

that her grandmother worked for. Her grandmother would bring home things that were basically

being either donated to the library or thrown in the trash, and she would rescue them

and bring them home to Octavia.

And she loved reading those books. They helped to fire her imagination, as Octavia told Terry

Gross on National Public Radio's Fresh Air in 1993.

I was an only child, and I was, I guess you could say, very much my own person. I kind

of constructed my own world as I went along.

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