Glastonbury sci-fi and fantasy author Liz Williams – co-director of the town's Witchcraft Shop – is casting a powerful literary spell this autumn with the publication of three new books.

Winterstrike (Tor Macmillan) is a novel set on far-future Mars; The Shadow Pavilion (Night Shade Books, USA) is a supernatural thriller set in a Chinese city; and Fabulous Whitby (Fabulous Albion), edited with Sue Thomason, is an anthology of short stories set in various fantastic versions of Whitby, North Yorkshire.

The Shadow Pavilion is the fourth in a series featuring a police inspector who acts as a liaison officer between Earth, hell and heaven, and which, Liz revealed, is currently under option with a production company in New York for film or TV.

"I write science fiction because I'm going to be living in the future," she told me. "You might as well try to find out something about the place you're going to live in before you get there."

Already the author of 10 novels and a short story collection, Liz also runs The Witching Hour, a pagan-oriented show on Glastonbury Radio and BBS Radio in the USA, with her partner Trevor Jones.

Liz has a PhD from Magdalene College, Cambridge, in the history and philosophy of science, and has lived and worked in Central Asia, setting up scholarship programmes for the governments of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Her mother, the novelist Veronica Williams, was extensively published by Robert Hale in the 1970s.

Liz appears regularly in the pages of sci-fi magazines, and is the secretary of the Milford SF Writers' Workshop, as well as a teacher of creative writing and the history of science fiction.

Her Banner of Souls has been nominated for the Philip K Dick Memorial Award, along with three previous novels, and the Arthur C Clarke Award.