(illustrated by Sarah Crawley)
Like rabbits: stories
Debut Short Fiction Collection, forthcoming from Scribner Canada.
LIKE RABBITS brings together short fiction at the intersection of history and science. A new father in the Golden Age of Dutch science searches for the source of life; two aviators at the cusp of their careers grapple with adulthood and a disastrous crash; a young woman prepares to write the Olympics of mathematics exams in 19th Century Cambridge; a manuscript changes hands from 9th Century Baghdad across centuries and continents, altering meanings as it goes. In each story, the deeply personal and the scientific layer to produce unexpected new meanings.
SElected Publications (short fiction & poetry)
- Two Bodies in Flight (The New Quarterly Issue 173, Winter 2025)
- ft. friendship, early aviation, and a crash. https://tnq.ca/issues/issue-173/ (Also available through Libby)
- Rescue Station (in the anthology of Canadian horror Northern Nights. Undertow Publications, ed. Michael Kelly. Fall, 2024) https://undertowpublications.com/shop/northern-nights.
- ft. a family crisis, a shipwreck, a breeches buoy, and an error in judgement. Inspired by the real-life Sable Island rescue station.
- *2024 preliminary ballot for the Stoker Award
- Like Rabbits (Winner of the RBC Bronwen Wallace short fiction award for Emerging Writers, Writers’ Trust of Canada, 2024)
- 17th C Dutch Anatomists and some thoughts on science & life & death. Read here
- Audiobook version from Apple Books available here, alongside the other Bronwen Wallace award poems and stories!
- https://www.cbc.ca/books/emerging-writers-nayani-jensen-and-faith-par%C3%A9-win-10k-rbc-bronwen-wallace-awards-1.7222856
- Jury Citation: “Like Rabbits” is historical fiction at its most intimate and convincing. This story beautifully harks back to the golden age of Dutch science, a time when men played gods. As one such man attempts to conceive with his wife, he seeks credit for his groundbreaking discoveries at great personal cost — only to face tragedy and his own mortality. With elegance, authority, and vitality, Nayani Jensen gives us a timeless story of ambition and a tender portrait of a marriage”
- Forward, Backward (Nature, Oct 25 2023).
- Featuring climate research, history, and time travel(ish). https://rdcu.be/drm7U
- The Muse (long con magazine, issue 15, 2023)
- Featuring pre-raphaelite art, poetry, and a tense night-time plein-air painting session. https://longconmag.com/issue-15/nayani-jensen/
- Two Poems (The New Quarterly Issue 166, Spring 2023)
- “Woodland Ghost” and “Violins”: https://tnq.ca/issues/issue-166/
- Behind-the-scenes: “Finding the form” (The New Quarterly online, 2023), https://tnq.ca/finding-the-form-with-nayani-jensen/
- A Thread of Gold (Augur Magazine Issue 5.1, “Joyful Imaginations,” 2022)
- A secret-stealing creature becomes embroiled in a very human love triangle. Preview here: https://www.augurmag.com/a-thread-of-gold/
- Misstep (Poetry in Motion, 2022)
- Viewable on bus routes around Halifax Regional Municipality. https://writers.ns.ca/programs/poetry-in-motion/water-2022/
Nayani Jensen 