Sylvia Victor Linsteadt is an author, a scholar of ancient history and myth, and certified wildlife tracker. She studied Literary Arts at Brown University, graduating with Honors in 2011. She is an associate of the Institute of Archaeomythology in Northern California, and has completed graduate level research at the University of Exeter with a focus on themes of maternity and the motherline as they relate to classical reception in early 20th century literature.

Sylvia’s writing—both fiction & non-fiction—is rooted in myth, ecology, feminism & bioregionalism, and is devoted to broadening our human stories to include the voices of the living land. She has a special devotion to the history, earth, language, music and mythscapes of Crete, where she lived on and off from 2018-2021 and where she continues to visit, study, dance and dream. Her latest collection The Venus Year (2023) traces the beginnings of this ongoing love story in both poetry and mythic prose.

Her other books include SOOTH, a set of divination cards and texts with painter Rima Staines (2025), the short story collection Our Lady of the Dark Country (2018), two novels for young readers, The Wild Folk and The Wild Folk Rising (Usborne, 2018 and 2019), and the folkloric novel Tatterdemalion (Unbound 2017), also with painter Rima Staines. Her works of nonfiction include the award-winning Lost Worlds of the San Francisco Bay Area (Heyday, Spring 2017), Wonderments of the East Bay (Heyday, 2015), as well as numerous essays. She is currently working on a forthcoming title for September/Duckworth, to be published in summer of 2026.

Sylvia is also the creator and course leader of When Women Were the Land, a seven-part lecture series through Advaya exploring the pre-patriarchal lineages and mythologies of Europe, inspired by the work of Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas.

Sylvia now divides her time between her pine forest home on Coast Miwok ancestral land on the Point Reyes Peninsula in California where she was born, and Devon, England. Her hives of bees, textile work with her hands, walks with her dog, gathering wild herbs, and learning old songs to sing with her brother are some of Sylvia’s greatest joys when she’s not at her writing desk.

‘Exquisite: Angela Carter gone feral with Ursula le Guin.’

- Jay Griffiths (on Tatterdemalion), author of Wild: An Elemental Journey

“The Venus Year achieves what Carl Jung meant when he said “the psyche is simply world.”

-Dr. Jack Dempsey, author of Ariadne’s Brother and Calendar House 

“Lost Worlds of the San Francisco Bay Area is more than a history, it is an experience, poignant and revelatory.” 

-Terry Tempest Williams, author of The Hour of Land