Ray Nayler is the author of the critically acclaimed, Locus Award winning novel The Mountain in the Sea. Called "One of the up-and-coming masters of SF short fiction" by Locus, Nayler's stories have seen print in Asimov's, Clarkesworld, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Vice, and Nightmare, as well as in many "Best Of" anthologies. His stories have won the Clarkesworld Readers' poll and the Asimov's Readers' Award, and his novelette "Sarcophagus" was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award.

Born in Quebec and raised in California, Nayler lived and worked abroad for two decades in Russia, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Vietnam, and Kosovo. A Russian speaker, he has also learned Turkmen, Albanian, Azerbaijani Turkish, and Vietnamese. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Institute for International Science and Technology Policy at The George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. He holds an MA in Global Diplomacy from the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS, the University of London. His novella The Tusks of Extinction will be published by Tor.com in January of 2024.