Kate Mascarenhas is a British writer and academic psychologist whose inventive, genre-blending debut novel The Psychology of Time Travel combined science fiction, murder mystery, and psychological insight with a distinctive female-centered perspective.
Kate Mascarenhas studied English at Oxford and applied psychology at Derby, and completed a PhD combining literary studies and psychology. That dual background informs her fiction, which brings genuine psychological insight to speculative premises.
Her debut novel, The Psychology of Time Travel (2018), won the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Newcomer and was praised for its fresh, female-centered take on time travel — focusing on how the experience would reshape the human mind and relationships, and structuring the story as a clever time-spanning murder mystery. She has since written The Thief on the Winged Horse and other work.
Mascarenhas is admired for her originality, her intelligence, and her ability to blend genre conventions with character-driven, psychologically grounded storytelling.