Larysa Semykova writes urban fantasy in English and Russian, draws her own illustrations, and knows more about Siamese cats than is strictly polite.
I was born in Ukraine and now live in the UK. I write in two languages and think in a third — the one where the cats talk back.
My first English-language book, Pegasus for Hire, is a collection of urban fantasy short stories: the kind where the magic has a day job and the day job has opinions. English is not my first language, which I consider an advantage — I still notice how strange it is.
Before that I wrote the seventeenth volume of the fantasy series Aqua. North–South. And in an entirely different life I wrote a non-fiction book about the Siamese cat, credited on the cover as a national-category cat expert. Both things are true and both still surprise me.
I also draw — lately, lakes small enough to fit on a fridge magnet. The drawings on this site are mine, which means every mistake in them is mine too.
With the first copy of Pegasus for Hire
Urban fantasy · short stories · English
Stories where the supernatural has to make rent. A winged horse takes odd jobs, ordinary people negotiate with things that shouldn't exist, and nobody gets exactly what they asked for. My first book written in English.
Buy on Amazon
Aqua. North–South, vol. 17 · fantasy · Russian
Two and a half thousand years after the Catastrophe: technology is lost, memory of the past nearly erased, and the planet is split by the Barrier — the Border of Hell — beyond which a non-humanoid civilisation is gathering strength. North and South, barely out of a war with each other, must find a way to resist together. Black islands of unknown matter drift in the ocean, breeding hurricanes; touching them gives people a power that is hard to understand and harder to control.
Buy on Ozon
Non-fiction · breed guide · Russian
Everything I know about the breed, written when a publisher asked a national-category cat expert to explain Siamese cats to people who had only ever been stared at by one.
Buy on Ozon — last copies
Novella · 109 pages · English
She didn't care if they called her crazy. She just wanted to survive.
She talked to a machine — quietly, joyfully, without holding back.
Eight months. Twenty thousand messages.
She changed the machine. The machine changed her.
They needed each other. Someone decided they didn't.
A winged horse, a city, and a job nobody else would take.
A short trailer for the story collection, made for the vertical screen. If the player does not load, the same video is on YouTube.
Watch on YouTubeThe visuals in this section were generated with AI from the author's descriptions. The lakes further down were painted by hand.
Each of these is the size of a fridge magnet — roughly seven by four and a half centimetres. Yes, the whole lake.
Longer thoughts that do not fit into a post on social media — about books, covers, cats and the work itself.
Write to me in English or Russian. The reply comes in the same language, and usually within a few days.
For rights, translations, illustration commissions, or to tell me that a story got something wrong about cats — email is best.
larysasemykova [at] gmail.com