Fatima Murakami is a Japanese–Moroccan science fiction writer and urbanist based in Rotterdam. Born in 1986 in Casablanca to a Nagasaki-born structural engineer and a linguist from Agadir, she studied architecture at TU Delft and worked on sustainable port redevelopments in the Dutch Caribbean before turning to fiction. Her debut, The Paper Elevator, was followed by Tide Maps for a Drowned Port and The Salt Roads of Mons Olympus, and her work has been shortlisted for the BSFA Award and the Kitschies.
Murakami's fiction explores infrastructure as destiny, multilingual cities, and how small errors ripple through vast systems. She has held research residencies with ESA's Advanced Concepts Team and at the Jan van Eyck Academie, and has spent extended periods on Aruba and Curaçao studying colonial-era harbors and modern logistics. She writes in English and Dutch, reads Japanese and Arabic, and occasionally lectures on speculative design at Delft and the Willem de Kooning Academy.
