Natalia Theodoridou is a transmasculine writer whose stories have appeared in publications such as Kenyon Review, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, and have been translated into Italian, French, Greek, Estonian, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic. Natalia won the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction and the Nebula Award for Game Writing in 2025. He holds a PhD in media and cultural studies from SOAS and is a Clarion West graduate. Natalia’s debut novel, Sour Cherry, a queer Bluebeard retelling about toxic masculinity and cycles of abuse, came out in April 2025 (Tin House & Wildfire). “And on Their Graves a Fall of Angels” is his 8th appearance in Uncanny, a powerful tale of community and grief, funerals, and angels.
Uncanny Magazine: “He was ten when he shot his first angel” is a great opening line. Did you know it when you started drafting, or did you circle back to it later in the drafting/revisions process? More generally: What do you need to know to start writing a story and what do you discover as you go?
Natalia Theodoridou: That line was the first thing I knew about the story. It was like an invitation, a quite insistent one; I had to write the story because that first line presented itself. I did go back and forth a bit on whether it should be in the first or third person; in the end, I thought it worked and sounded better in third, and that was the deciding factor for the point of view in the rest of the story.
In general, I do need the opening line to start writing a story. That usually means I have the voice down. If I also have the last line, or at least a sense of where I need to end up, I’m ready to start. The rest can be discovered as I go along, but I need a relatively firm grasp of where my starting point is and in which direction I need to aim the story.
Uncanny Magazine: The world of this story is vivid and poignant, with birdlike angels and funerals for people both dead and still (for a short time) living. What was the most challenging part of creating the world for this story? What was the easiest thing?
Natalia Theodoridou: This novelette is actually a sequel to “What It Sounds Like When You Fall,” a short story that was published in Nightmare Magazine in 2019, in which Stefan is still a child, revolving around Uncle Pete’s funeral. So in a sense all the worldbuilding for this story had already happened years ago, and the challenge was deciding whether it was the right thing to pin down that child’s future for readers; what would be gained, and what might be lost?
The angels themselves are based on the biblical six-winged cherubim that I was fascinated with as a child. Greek Orthodox churches are full of depictions of them, and they always looked like human-faced pigeons to me. They are weird and numerous, just like real pigeons. To me, these creatures invite questions by blurring the lines between human and animal, holy and profane. In Greece and elsewhere, pigeons are treated as pests these days, but were prized as messengers a few decades earlier, and a lot of people still find comfort in feeding them in public squares and parks. So I wondered, what would happen if we took this complexity one step further, and the holy was treated a pest?
Uncanny Magazine: The angels sometimes left trinkets, small trivial things. If they left something for you, what would you want it to be, and why?
Natalia Theodoridou: This is such a good question, and something I’d never considered before. I think I’d like a seashell, one of those you can press your ear to and hear the roaring sea. It feels like the perfect funeral gift for a writer, you know? Look at the beautiful things we leave behind when we go!
Uncanny Magazine: What research did you do for this story? Did you turn up anything that surprised you?
Natalia Theodoridou: I sometimes have trouble naming my characters; I hesitated to name my main character (who was unnamed in the older story in which he was still a child), but the fact that he’s trans made me want to give him a name that mattered. I settled on Stefan (it comes from the Greek word for “wreath” or “crown,” and that is also the word used for “halo”—a crown of light) because it felt right thematically. I googled it on a whim and learned it’s also the name of a lunar crater, which I found sad and delightful, and it became a really important thread for the entire story.
Uncanny Magazine: Who are some of your literary influences? What is something you’ve read recently and loved?
Natalia Theodoridou: Oh, so many things. A lot of my influences come from my drama background: Greek tragedy, theatre of the absurd, Roland Barthes, Heiner Müller, Sarah Kane. I’ve been enjoying a good deal of literary horror recently: Julia Armfield, some older Helen Oyeyemi, Alison Rumfitt.
Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?
Natalia Theodoridou: I’m working on another novel. It actually predates Sour Cherry, my debut, by several years: It started out as a short that failed, then became a novella that called for more. So it’s a story that has been with me for a very long time, and I hope I’ve finally figured out how to tell it.
Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!
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