Fantasy authors

Below you will find a list, ordered alphabetically by first name, of every fantasy author for whom we have a biography, bibliography or book reviews on Fantasy Book Review. Simply click on the author's name to go through to the author's page, which contains the full information.

AA Milne

A.A. Milne was borne in London in 1882. He began his writing career with humorous pieces for Punch magazine. It was in this publication, in 1923, that Winnie-the-Pooh made his first appearance in the poem Teddy Bear. Milne also wrote plays and by the time When We Were Very Young, his first book of poems for children, was published in 1924; he had already made his name as a dramatist and novelist.

AB Shires

AB Shires was born in Bradford and spent a large portion of his childhood in hospital, where he spent his time reading children’s fiction. The adventures of his fictional characters offered an escape from the pains of treatment, sometimes within the pages of books and sometimes dreaming about alternate realities. Overcoming his disabilities, Shires has worked for both public and private enterprises.

Adam Christopher

Christopher's debut novel, a science fiction/superhero noir called Empire State, was released by Angry Robot in January 2012. His second novel, Seven Wonders, a spandex-clad superhero adventure, followed the same year. His short fiction has appeared in Pantechnicon, Hub, and Dark Fiction Magazine, and has been nominated for the British Science Fiction Association, British Fantasy Society, and Parsec awards. In 2010, as an editor, he won a Sir Julius Vogel award, New Zealand’s highest science fiction honour.

Adam Nevill

Adam Nevill has been a devotee of the supernatural in fiction since his father read him M R James at bedtime. As well as The Ritual and Apartment 16, Adam is the author of the occult thriller Banquet of the Damned.

Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky was born in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, before heading off to Reading to study psychology and zoology. For reasons unclear even to himself he subsequently ended up in law and has worked as a legal executive in both Reading and Leeds, where he now lives.

Alan Campbell

Alan Campbell was born in Falkirk, Scotland, and grew up there, before moving on to study Computer Science at Edinburgh University. After graduating, he worked for DMA Design, Visual Sciences and Rockstar, developing video games: Body Harvest for the Nintendo 64, Formula One 2000 for the Playstation, and the Grand Theft Auto series on the PC and PS2. After finishing Vice City, he left to pursue a career in photography and to write.

Alan Garner

Alan Garner is best known for his children's fantasy novels and his retellings of traditional British folk tales.

Alastair Reynolds

Alastair Reynolds is a science fiction author of ten novels and around fifty short stories.

Alden Bell

Alden Bell lives in New York with his wife, an Edgar-award-winning novelist. For the past ten years he has taught high school English at an Upper East Side prep school. Since 2002, he has also taught literature and cultural studies courses as an adjunct professor at the New School. He graduated from Berkeley with a degree in English and a minor in creative writing. In 2000, he received his Master’s and Ph.D. in English at New York University, specializing in twentieth-century American and British literature.

Alex Bell

Alex Bell was born in 1986 in Hampshire. She studied Law on and off for six long years before the boredom became so overwhelming that she had to throw down the textbooks and run madly from the building. Since then she has never looked back. She has travelled widely, is a ferociously strict vegetarian and generally prefers cats to people.

Alex Irvine

Alexander Irvine is an American fantasy and science fiction writer who first gained attention with his Locus - and Crawford - Award-winning 2002 novel A Scattering of Jades.

Alex Pemberton

I was born in 1979 at the London Middlesex Hospital to a Yugoslavian mother and an English father. My first memories of growing up were of Finchley where I lived for four years before my parents moved to Hertfordshire.

Alex Scarrow

Alex Scarrow used to be a rock guitarist, then he became a graphic artist, then he decided to be a computer games designer. Finally, he grew up and became an author. He has written a number of successful thrillers and several screenplays, but it's YA fiction that has allowed him to really have fun with the ideas and concepts he was playing around with when designing games.

Alexander Janaway

Alexander S Janaway is a former officer with the Royal Engineers and during his time in active service took part in operational tours in Kosovo and the Middle East. He has a bachelor’s degree in English and American literature as well as a Master’s Degree in the Psychology of Work. Today he works as training and project manager in the computer games industry. Redoubt is his first novel and he is currently working on his second.

Alexey Pehov

Alexey Pehov is a Russian fantasy and science fiction writer. Pehov's first novel to be translated into English, SHADOW PROWLER, the first book in a trilogy, was sold in a pre-empt to Tom Doherty at Tor Books for six figures. Shortly after it sold in the U.S., the series found success in the foreign markets, with Simon and Schuster in the UK pre-empting the trilogy with a six-figure deal at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and Piper buying the series at auction for the German market.

Alison Croggon

When I was ten years old, my big ambition was to write a fantasy novel. It was all my parents' fault. One night I couldn't sleep because they were fighting, and after they finally went to bed I crept into the empty kitchen. On the table was a single volume paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings which my father had left there, and I started reading it out of idle curiosity. I sat up all that night reading and read it all the next day, until I had finished it. Then I started reading it again.

Alison Goodman

Alison Goodman was born in Melbourne and, after a bit of wandering, recently returned to live there. She was a D.J. O’Hearn Memorial Fellow at Melbourne University, holds a Masters degree and teaches creative writing at postgraduate level. Her debut novel was the award-winning futuristic thriller Singing the Dogstar Blues and her most recent, the acclaimed Killing the Rabbit.

Allison Brennan

New York Times and USA Today bestseller Allison Brennan is the author of thirteen novels and three short stories. A former consultant in the California State Legislature, she lives in Northern California with her husband Dan and their five children.

Alyson Noel

Alyson Noël is the #1 New York Times best selling, award-winning, author of Faking 19, Art Geeks and Prom Queens, Laguna Cove, Fly Me to the Moon, Kiss and Blog, Saving Zoë, Cruel Summer and the Immortals series.

Amanda Downum

Amanda was born in Virginia, and has since then spent time in Indonesia, Micronesia, Missouri, and Arizona, with brief layovers in California and Colorado. Seventeen years ago she was sucked into the gravity well of Texas, and hasn't managed to escape. Yet.

Amy Kennedy

As a self proclaimed day dreamer, Amy Kennedy has been dreaming up stories and writing since the age of twelve. Her dreaming and writing were temporarily cut short in 1994, when, after the birth of her second son, she was diagnosed with renal failure. It took four and a half long years of dialysis and a few near death experiences before God restored her by way of a kidney transplant. Amy gives thanks to the Lord every day for not only restoring her health but also her creativity and ministry. Seed of Seerling is her first published book.

Andrew Davenport

Andrew Davenport 42 has a BSc in speech science and is the co-creator and writer of the Teletubbies and In The Night Garden television series and books. He has also directed and produced for the Teletubbies and is also an actor, appearing as the character ‘Tiny’ in Tots TV.

Andrew Davidson

Andrew Davidson was born in Pinawa, Manitoba, and graduated in 1995 from the University of British Columbia with a B.A. in English literature. He has worked as a teacher in Japan, where he has lived on and off, and as a writer of English lessons for Japanese Web sites. The Gargoyle, the product of seven years' worth of research and composition, is his first book. Davidson lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Andrew Steele

Andrew Steele has always been enthralled with the world beneath him; and in awe of our galaxy and the universe beyond. As he watches his daughter and sons grow up – and the brilliance in each of them – he often wonders, "What a great adventure it would be for them to explore the galaxy." So Andrew wrote his children a story, and thought it would be great to share the Galaxy Boys adventure with those who might also dream of what is really out there, awaiting those who accept the challenge to embark on a grand galactic adventure.

Andrzej Sapkowski

Andrzej Sapkowski was born on the 21st of June 1948 in Lodz, Poland.

Angie Sage

Angie Sage was born in London and grew up in the Thames Valley and Kent. As a child she loved reading and particularly liked E. Nesbitt and Elizabeth Gouge. Her father worked in publishing and would bring home beautifully bound “dummy books” with blank pages that the young Sage would fill with pictures and stories.

Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

Anne McCaffrey is one of the world's leading science-fiction writers, and has won both the Hugo and Nebula awards as well as the Margaret A. Edwards' Lifetime Achievement Literary Award. Elizabeth Ann Scarborough won a Nebula Award in 1989 for her novel The Healer's War.

Anne Rice

One of America's most read and celebrated authors, Anne Rice is known for weaving the visible and supernatural worlds together in epic stories that both entertain and challenge readers. Her books are rich tapestries of history, belief, philosophy, religion, and compelling characters that examine and extend our physical world beyond the limits we perceive. Anne lives and works in California. Anne's life experiences and intellectual inquisitiveness provide her with constant inspiration for her work.

Antoine De Saint Exupery

Antoine Marie Roger de Saint-Exupery was a French pilot, poet and author. Born in Lyon, France on June 29, 1900, Saint-Exupery dreampt of becoming a naval officer, but was refused admission to the French Naval Academy. Instead, he was called up by the French Air Force in 1921 (though not as a pilot). It was there he found his passion to fly airplanes.

Arthur C Clarke

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, born in 1917, produced some of the most well-know science fiction in the history of the genre. Born in Britain, but spending a lot of his life in Sri Lanka, Arthur C Clarke’s expansive interest and knowledge of space and technology form the main themes of his work.

Astrid Lindgren

Astrid Lindgren was a famous Swedish writer of children's books, best-known for her independent, energetic, and unconventional characters Pippi Longstocking, the noisy Nyman kids, and Emil, the master of pranks. She appealed to the little anarchist living inside every small child.

Ben Aaronovitch

Ben Aaronovitch was born in 1964. Discovering in his early twenties that he had precisely one talent, he took up screenwriting at which he was an overnight success.

Ben Horton

Ben Horton was born in Buckinghamshire, grew up in Norfolk, went to university in Cambridge and now lives in London. When not writing, Ben runs a theatre company, enjoys cooking and watching films like Batman and X-Men.

Ben Kane

I was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1970, where my dad worked as a vet for the Kenyan government. We returned to Ireland when I was 7, and I went to school in Dundalk, a town about 50 miles north of Dublin on the east coast. From an early age, I loved reading and all things historical, devouring classics written by authors like Henry Treece, Rosemary Sutcliffe, T.H. White and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s excellent medieval novels, Sir Nigel and The White Company. I spent a lot of time reading fantasy too – J. R. R. Tolkien, Julian May, Susan Cooper, Ursula le Guin, Ann McCaffrey, Roger Zelazny, Stephen Donaldson, Guy Gavriel Kay and Michael Scott Rohan to name but a few. As a teenager, I also enjoyed Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe novels, as well as Wilbur Smith’s African sagas.

Benedict Jacka

One overcast day in November I sat down at a study cubicle in my school library. I was 18 years old and in my final year at City of London School, and the library was on the third floor, looking out over the River Thames. I was supposed to be working but instead I stared out of the window across the water, and when I finally picked up my pen what I began to write in the back of my exercise book wasn’t schoolwork but the notes for a story.

Beth Revis

Beth Revis writes science fiction and fantasy novels for teens. Her debut novel, Across the Universe, launched from Penguin/Razorbill in January 2011 and is the first of a trilogy.

BJ Burton

BJ Burton was born in Birmingham in 1947 and educated at Handsworth Grammar School and Leeds University. Married to Cheryl, he moved to Cornwall in 1972 having lived in Birmingham, Leeds and Sheffield. Currently living in Brixham.

BJ Edwards

BJ Edwards was born in 1975 and grew up in Middlesex and Worcester. Edwards has always been fascinated by anthropology, theology, archaeology and prehistory and his degree is in English literature allowed him to teach English before taking up writing full time.

Bram Stoker

Abraham Stoker (1847 - 1912), was always unwell when an infant - he couldn't stand up until he was seven years old - yet he became a champion athlete whilst at Trinity College, Dublin. Like so many children whose health is poor Bram had lots of time to read and developed a real passion for literature.

Brandon Sanderson

Brandon Sanderson was born in December of 1975 in Lincoln, Nebraska. As a child Brandon enjoyed reading, but he lost interest in the types of titles often suggested for him, and by junior high he never cracked a book if he could help it. This all changed in 8th grade when an astute teacher, Mrs. Reader, gave Brandon Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly. Brandon thoroughly enjoyed this book, and went in search of anything similar. He discovered such authors as David Eddings, Melanie Rawn, Robert Jordan, Anne McCaffrey, and Orson Scott Card. Brandon continued to be an avid reader through junior high and high school. He liked epic fantasy so much that he even tried his hand at writing some. His first attempts, he says, were dreadful.

Brenda Clough

Brenda Clough is an author of science fiction and fantasy novels. She also writes short stories and occasional non-fiction. Spending much of her childhood overseas, courtesy of the U.S. government, she has lived in Laos, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Germany. She returned to Pittsburgh, PA to earn a degree in English/Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University in 1977.

Brent Weeks

Brent Weeks was born and raised in Montana. After getting his paper keys from Hillsdale College, Brent had brief stints walking the earth like Caine from Kung Fu, tending bar, and corrupting the youth. (Not at the same time.) He started writing on bar napkins, then on lesson plans, then full time. Eventually, someone paid him for it. Brent lives in Oregon with his wife, Kristi. He doesn’t own cats or wear a ponytail.

Cassandra Clare

Cassandra Clare was born to American parents in Teheran, Iran and spent much of her childhood travelling the world with her family. She turned to writing fantasy fiction full time in 2006.

Catherine Banner

Catherine Banner must be one of the most talented people in the UK – she started writing her first book, The Eyes of a King, when she was just 14 years old, and has found publishing success while still a teenager.

Catherine Cooper

Catherine Cooper has taught in primary schools for 29 years. Her love of history, myths, legends and the Shropshire countryside gave her the ideal grounding to write an extraordinary magical fantasy adventure. Book 2 in the Jack Brenin series, Glasruhen Gate, is due out in the spring of 2010. Before that Catherine has two other books ready to be published, Hawke and Co. and Hanging Gate Hall. To find out more about The Golden Acorn visit www.pengridion.co.uk

Catherynne M Valente

Catherynne M. Valente was born in Seattle in 1979. She graduated from high school at age 15, going on to UC San Diego and Edinburgh University, receiving her B.A. in Classics with an emphasis in Ancient Greek Linguistics. Her first novel, The Labyrinth, was published in 2004, and her second, Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams was released in the summer of 2005. Her third novel, The Grass-Cutting Sword, came out in the summer of 2006. Prime has also published two collections of her poetry, Apocrypha, and Oracles. Her third volume of poetry, The Descent of Inanna, was published early in 2006.

Charlaine Harris

Charlaine Harris, a native of the Mississippi Delta, grew up in the middle of a cotton field. Though her early output consisted largely of ghost stories, by the time she hit college Charlaine was writing poetry and plays. After holding down some low-level jobs, she had the opportunity to stay home and write, and the resulting two stand-alones were published by Houghton Mifflin. After a child-producing sabbatical, Charlaine began writing a mystery series, and soon had her own books about a Georgia librarian, Aurora Teagarden.

China Mieville

China Miéville lives and works in London. His first novel, King Rat, was published in 1998, Perdido Street Station (winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award) followed in 2000, The Scar (winner of the British Fantasy Award) in 2002, Iron Council in 2004 (winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award), and Looking for Jake and Other Stories in 2006.

Chris Bradford

Chris Bradford lives an action packed life and is a self-confessed adrenaline junkie. He’s thrown himself over Victoria Falls on a bungee cord, out of an airplane in New Zealand and off a French mountain on a paraglider, but he’s always managed to land safely – something he learnt from his martial arts training…

Chris Priestley

Ever since he was a teenager Chris has loved unsettling and creepy stories, with fond memories of buying comics like Strange Tales and House of Mystery, watching classic BBC TV adaptations of M R James ghost stories every Christmas and reading assorted weirdness by everyone from Edgar Allen Poe to Ray Bradbury. He hopes Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror will haunt his readers in the way those writers have haunted him.

Chris Wooding

Chris Wooding grew up in a small town in Leicestershire, where not much of anything happened. So he started to write novels. He was sixteen when he completed his first. He had an agent by eighteen. By nineteen he had signed his first book deal. When he left university he began to write full-time, and he has been doing it professionally all his adult life.

Christian Dunn

After cutting his teeth on Inferno! and Warhammer Monthly Christian Dunn spent many years as the Commissioning Editor of both Black Flame and Solaris. He is currently with Black Library as their Range Development Editor where he runs the e-book, Print on Demand and audio ranges, as well as being responsible for unearthing new writing talent. He lives in Nottingham, England.

Christie Golden

Christie Golden has written over thirty-five novels and several short stories in the fields of science fiction, fantasy and horror. She has over a million books in print.

Christopher Golden

Christopher Golden is the award-winning, bestselling author of such novels as The Myth Hunters, Wildwood Road, The Boys Are Back in Town, The Ferryman, Strangewood, Of Saints and Shadows, and (with Tim Lebbon) The Map of Moments. He has also written books for teens and young adults, including Poison Ink, Soulless, and the thriller series Body of Evidence, honoured by the New York Public Library and chosen as one of YALSA's Best Books for Young Readers.

Christopher Paolini

Christopher Paolini was born on the 17th November 1983 in Southern California. His best known works include Eragon and Eldest, both part of the Inheritance Cycle. Paolini's childhood was spent in the Paradise Valley of Montana. Christopher was taught at home and passed his accredited correspondence courses at the age of 15. Following his graduation he began writing the novels that would go on to become Eragon and Eldest.

Chuck Hogan

Chuck Hogan is the author of several acclaimed novels, including Devils in Exile and The Killing Moon. The Town was awarded the Hammett Prize for excellence in crime writing, and named one of the ten best novels of the year by Stephen King. He is also the co-author, with Guillermo del Toro, of the international bestseller The Strain. He lives with his family outside Boston.

Clive Barker

Clive Barker was born in Liverpool in 1952. He studied English Literature and Philosophy at Liverpool before moving to London at the age of twenty-one. By his late-twenties Barker had published Book of Blood, Volumes 1–3 which achieved modest success. Three more volumes followed (Book of Blood, Volumes 4-6).

CM Debell

After completing a degree in Theology, a six month trip to Australia ended up as a four year expedition around Australia, New Zealand and Asia. C.M. Debell has worked as a journalist since her return to the UK and now edits a successful trade publication.

Colin R Parsons

Colin was born on the 8th of November 1960 in the Rhondda Valley in South Wales. He did a variety of short stories over the year’s until in 2004 wrote his first novel. This soon turned into his ‘Wizards’ Kingdom trilogy.’ Wizards’ Kingdom book 1…The Obelisk of Ashmar book 2 and Jarrak’s Darkness book 3. The beautiful welsh landscape of forest’s and lakes provided Colin with inspiration for his writing. He still lives in the Rhondda Valley with his wife Janice and his two sons, Kristoffer and Ryan.

Cornelia Funke

Born on 10th December 1958 in Dorsten, Germany, Cornelia Caroline Funke aspired to being an astronaut when a child but took the route of studying education theory at Hamburg University. After graduating Funke (pronounced - FOON-ka) took the position of Social Worker and dedicated her three years in this role to deprived children. She then took a job as an illustrator and board game designer after completing a postgraduate course at Hamburg University of Design but soon realised that she wanted to write and illustrate her own stories; her time working with children had certainly given her an insight into the type of stories that children wanted to read and enjoy. Establishing herself with the Ghosthunters (Gespensterjäger) and Wild Chicks (Wild H?hner) series of books in her home country it was the fantasy novel Dragon Rider in 1996 that saw her on the New York Times bestseller list for 78 weeks and brought her writing to an international audience. She has since gone on to write several popular titles not least the Inkheart trilogy. After receiving critical acclaim and several awards including the Book Sense Children’s Literature Award she moved to Los Angeles in 2005 with her husband Rolf and their children Anna and Ben. However, the joy of her success has also been tinged with sadness as Rolf her husband of 25 years died of cancer in 2006. The Inkheart trilogy was completed in 2008 with the book Inkdeath following the release of Inkspell which won her the Book Sense Book of the Year Children’s Literature Award in 2006 and Inkheart has now become the subject of a multi-million pound film staring Brendan Fraser.

CS Lewis

C.S. (Clive Staples) Lewis, also known as Jack was born in the Northern Irish town of Belfast in 1898. He was one of two boys born to his father Albert J. Lewis and his mother Florence Augusta Hamilton Lewis, his brother Warren Hamilton Lewis was born in 1895. His upbringing was comfortable and the library of the family home was full of books that the young Lewis enjoyed reading. CS Lewis endured as difficult as year as can be imaged when, in 1908, his mother, father and brother all died.

CS Marks

C.S. Marks has often been described as a Renaissance woman. The daughter of academic parents, she holds a Ph.D. in Biology and has spent the past two decades teaching Biology and Equine Science. She is currently a Full Professor at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College in west central Indiana.

DA Adams

D. A. Adams was born in Florida and raised in East Tennessee. He received a Master of Arts in Writing from the University of Memphis in 1999 and has taught college English for over a decade. His first novel, The Brotherhood of Dwarves, was released in 2005. In 2008, the sequel, Red Sky at Dawn, was released.

Dan Wells

Dan Wells was born in 1977. His parents were avid readers and SF/Fantasy fans, and when he was six years old his dad read him The Hobbit. He has been hooked on everything like it ever since.

Daniel Abraham

Once upon a time, there was a writer who wrote novels under three names — well, two and a half, really. Daniel Abraham wrote epic fantasy set other worlds, MLN Hanover wrote urban fantasy set in something very like our world, and James S. A. Corey wrote science fiction set well into the future. In the real world, he was Daniel Abraham, except that James S. A. Corey was written with a partner named Ty Franck.

Daniel Fox

Daniel Fox is a British writer who first went to Taiwan at the millennium and became obsessed, to the point of learning Mandarin and writing about the country in three different genres. Before this he had published a couple of dozen books and many hundreds of short stories, under a clutch of other names. He has also written poetry and plays. Some of this work has won awards.

Daniel Polansky

Daniel Polansky was born in Baltimore. The Straight Razor Cure was his first novel, and the first part of the Low Town series.

Darren Shan

Darren Shan's real name is Darren O’Shaughnessy. Although he is Irish, he was born on July 2, 1972, in St. Thomas’ Hospital, London - directly across the river from the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. Darren went to primary school in Askeaton, where his mother was a teacher, then to secondary school in Copsewood College in Pallaskenry. Later, he went back to London to study Sociology and English at Roehampton University.

Daryl Gregory

Daryl Gregory's first novel, Pandemonium, was published in 2008 and won the 2009 Crawford Award, given each year by critics and scholars of the fantasy field to "an oustanding new fantasy writer whose first book was published the previous year." The book was also a finalist for The Shirley Jackson Award, the Locus Award, and the Mythopoeic Award for best fantasy adult novel.

David Anthony Durham

David Anthony Durham was born in New York City in 1969. The child of parents of Caribbean ancestry, he grew up in Maryland. He began writing seriously while an undergraduate on a Creative Arts Scholarship at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. While there his short story, August Fury, won the 1990 Malcolm C. Braly Award for Fiction. Another story, The Boy-Fish, won the 1992 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Fiction Award and was published in Catalyst.

David Bryan Russell

David Bryan Russell was born in Los Angeles in 1950. At an early age he exhibited a marked skill in the visual arts. He received his formal training at California’s prestigious Art Center College of Design. Russell’s artwork always reflected his love of mythology, particularly the Norse sagas. His early visual style was also strongly influenced by the noted comic book illustrator Jack Kirby, with whom he later developed a deep friendship.

David Burrows

I was born at a very early age in Nairobi, Kenya. My teenage years, I spent in Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire and I went to Arnold School, Blackpool. Later, I went to Liverpool University where I received a degree and PhD, both in physics, the latter in nuclear structure physics. My chat up line at discos was “I’m a nuclear physicist” which I admit went down like a lead balloon. Upon leaving Liverpool I moved to Edinburgh where I worked on airborne radar. In Edinburgh I also served in the TA as an infantry Captain in 2/52 Lowland battalion.

David Eddings

David Eddings is an American born author best know for his epic fantasy novels. The Belgariad and the Mallorean are his most loved works and two characters in particular; Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress have entered into fantasy folklore.

David Farland

David Farland, an American author of fantasy fiction, is the pseudonym of Dave Wolverton. Dave Wolverton, who is well known as an author of science fiction, lives in Utah with his wife and five children.

David Gemmell

David Gemmell was born in 1948 in West London, England. His school life ended at the age of sixteen when he was expelled for his part in an organized gambling syndicate. After leaving school Gemmell became a labourer in the daytime and a bouncer at night in the pubs and clubs of London.

David Gunn

Smartly dressed, resourceful, and discreet, David Gunn has undertaken assignments in Central America, North Africa and Russia (amongst numerous other places). Coming from a service family, he is happiest when on the move and tends not to stay in one place for very long but if he calls anywhere home, it's the UK.

David H Webb

David Webb lives in Sydney, Australia, with his wife, Natalie, and their children. He studied at the University of Sydney, Moore College, and more recently at Tanglewood in Sydney where he developed skills in counselling with a personal interest in the men’s movement and authentic masculinity. Influences include: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as well as Robert Bly, Larry Crabb, Dan Allender, John Webb, and John Eldredge.

David Tallerman

David Tallerman is the author of around a hundred short stories, as well as comic scripts and poems, countless reviews and articles and at least two novels. Many of these are already available in print, online and in podcast. Not liking to be pinned down, David's work ranges from gruesome horror to comic fantasy, from political science-fiction to tales about mechanically assisted grizzly bears battling Nazi dolphins on the moon.

David Whitley

David Whitley was born in 1984 and graduated from the University of Oxford with a double First in English Literature and a passion for writing children’s fiction. At age 17 his first children’s novel was shortlisted for the Kathleen Fidler Award and at 20 he won the Cheshire Prize for Literature for a children’s short story; the youngest writer ever to win this prestigious award which was presented by Michael Morpurgo. In 2005 David appeared on BBC2’s University Challenge where he was a member of the winning Corpus Christi team who beat all competitors to become Series Champions. He is also a keen actor, director and chorister. David currently lives in Cheshire and is working on his second novel.

Dean Vincent Carter

Dean Vincent Carter began writing short stories at the age of fourteen. After graduating from Thames Valley University with a degree in English and Media Studies, he worked in sales and as a bookseller before getting a job in the facilities department at Transworld Publishers and Random House Children's Books. His writing talent was spotted by his editor after she read his company-wide emails. His first novel, The Hand of the Devil was published in 2006 to great critical acclaim. He lives in Hounslow, Middlesex.

Derek Landy

Before writing his children's story about a sharply-dressed skeleton detective, Derek Landy wrote the screenplays for a zombie movie and a murderous thriller in which everybody dies.

Diana Wynne Jones

Diana Wynne Jones was born in London on August 16, 1934). She is a British writer whose better-known works include the Chrestomanci series and the novels Howl's Moving Castle and Dark Lord of Derkholm.

DM Cornish

D.M. Cornish was born in time to see the first Star Wars movie. He was five. It made him realise that worlds beyond his own were possible, and he failed to eat his popcorn. The next important moment in his life was when he read the Boland Light Railway by BB. A wonderfully well-thought out world of gnomes and the railway they had made, it built on his already established idea that other worlds were just out of reach somewhere. Lego was the vehicle for expressing his ideas. He didn’t just build spaceships, he imagined the worlds and the stories of the little people he had literally built with his own hands.

Douglas Jackson

Douglas Jackson wrote Caligula, his first novel, on a packed commuter train between Stirling and Edinburgh every day on his way to work, and signed up by a literary agent when he asked for feedback on his writing on www.YouWriteOn.com.

Drew Karpyshyn

Drew Karpyshyn, a Canadian author and game designer, was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada on July 28, 1971. and grew up in St. Albert, a city just a few minutes northwest of Edmonton.

EA Sunden

E.A. Sunden’s debut novel Domain of Illusion reveals a fantasy world in upheaval. Once a bright and beautiful oasis, the Valley of Tsura faces bleak times. The assassination of the High Emperor followed cruelly on the heels of Empress Zaiya’s unexpected death after the birth of her first child, Naora. Now, strange smoke phantoms are openly attacking the small agrarian village. The direct results of such attacks seem to be three mysterious illnesses previously unknown to the people of the valley. With the strange disappearance of the High Emperor’s eldest son, it is up to his younger twin brothers Emperor’s Arel and Kozai to unravel the mysterious plot against the valley before the malevolence of a hidden power consumes all.

EB White

Elwyn Brooks White was born on 11th July 1899 in Mount Vernon, New York. He graduated from Cornell University in 1921, then travelled about trying many sorts of jobs, and finally joined the New Yorker magazine. He kept animals on his farm in Maine, and some of these creatures crept into his stories and books. In 1970 Mr. White received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, given every five years for distinguished services to children’s literature by the American Library Association. In 1978 he was awarded an honorary Pulizer Prize for his work as a whole. Married to Katherine White, author of ‘Onward and Upward in the garden’ he was also father to Joel White After a long battle with Alzheimer’s Disease E. B. died on 1st October 1985 at home in his farm house.

EE Richardson

E.E. Richardson is a cybernetics graduate. Her first novel, The Devil's Footsteps, was published to great critical acclaim shortly after she graduated from university and was followed by a second novel, The Intruders. The Summoning is the third novel from this talented writer.

Emily Gee

Emily Gee grew up in a house full of words and books: her mother worked as a librarian and a proof-reader, and her father was a writer.

Eoin Colfer

Born on 14th May 1965 in Wexford, South-East Ireland Eoin Colfer attended Dublin University to gain his degree and qualify as a primary school teacher like his father before him. Returning to Wexford to begin his teaching career he left his home county once again in 1992, this time with his now wife Jackie, whom he married in 1991, to teach in East Africa, Asia and Europe (Italy) over a period of four years. His first book, Benny and Omar was inspired by his experiences in Tunisia, East Africa and was published in 1998. It has since gone on to be translated into several different European languages.

Eric Carle

Eric Carle is the creator of illustrated and innovatively designed picture books for very young children. His best-known work, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, has eaten its way into the hearts of literally millions of children all over the world and has been translated into more than 47 languages and sold over 29 million copies. Carle has illustrated more than seventy books, many best sellers, most of which he also wrote, and more than 88 million copies of his books have sold around the world.

Erik Buchanan

Erik Buchanan lives in Toronto, Canada and is the author of Small Magics. Small Magics was published by Dragon Moon Press and on shelves in 2007. Erik lists his interests as writing, acting, stage combat, martial arts, politics, archaeology, anthropology and philosophy. His favourite films include Harry Potter, Aliens and Willow while among his favourite musicians are the Counting Crows, Sting, REM and Tom Petty.

Erin Hunter

Erin Hunter does not, in reality, exist. She is the pen name of three authors and an editor who work together to write fantasy books, most notably the Warriors series.

Estevan Vega

As a young boy, Estevan Vega never really felt interested in the written word. Far more fascinating things like comic book superheroes and sketching fantastical beings caught his eye and captured a wild spirit. But in the fifth grade, writing short essays for a standoffish teacher ignited a fire that is still burning. Using his witty and imaginative father as a springboard for ideas, Vega set out to write a full manuscript. His dream to become a published author came forth when he was just 15 years old, releasing his first literary creation, Servant of the Realm, to the world, a story about a teenager who sees the future deaths of those he loves and tries to change it.

Fiona McIntosh

Fiona McIntosh was raised in the UK but left London to travel, and found herself in Australia where she fell in love with the country and one person in particular. She has since roamed the world for her work in the travel industry but has settled down to full-time writing. McIntosh lives with her husband and teenage sons, splitting her time between city life in South Australia and the wilderness of Tasmania.

Fran Jacobs

Fran Jacobs graduated from the University of Nottingham with a Masters degree in Ancient History in 2001, and now lives in Swansea, South Wales, where she runs an online gothic website, Megaera’s Realm. Fran mostly writes fantasy, with a penchant for the darker side of it, and her stories have been published in a variety of magazines including Forgotten Worlds, Nanobison, Neo-opsis and Alien Skin Magazine. But she also dabbles in writing macabre short stories and articles on witches, black magic and vengeful female poisoners.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Frances Hodgson Burnett was born in Cheetham Hill, Manchester on 24th November 1849. Burnett’s father died when she was five, so her mother was left to raise her and her four siblings alone. The family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee in 1865 – two years later, her mother passed away, leaving Burnett to care for two younger siblings by herself.

Frank Hoyle

Sir Fred Hoyle FRS was an English astronomer and mathematician noted primarily for his contribution to the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and his often controversial stance on other cosmological and scientific matters—in particular his rejection of the "Big Bang" theory, a term originally coined by him out of ridicule for the main rival of his own theory. In addition to his work as an astronomer, Hoyle was a writer of science fiction. He died in Bournemouth, England, after a series of strokes.

Frank P Ryan

Frank Ryan is a distinguished and multiple-bestselling author, in the UK and US. He is one of those rare writers who can write fluently and engagingly in both fiction and non-fiction.

Gail Carson Levine

Gail Carson Levine grew up in New York City and has been writing all her life. Her first book for children, Ella Enchanted, was a 1998 Newbery Honor Book. Other books include Ever, Fairest, Dave at Night, an ALA Notable Book and Best Book for Young Adults; The Wish, The Fairy's Return, The Two Princesses of Bamarre, and the six Princess Tales books. She is also the author of the nonfiction book Writing Magic: Creating Stories That Fly and the picture book Betsy Who Cried Wolf, illustrated by Scott Nash.

Garth Nix

Nix was born in 1963 in Melbourne, Australia, and spent his childhood in Canberra. Before attended the University of Canberra from 1984-1986 he spent time travelling in the UK. Emerging in 1986 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in professional writing, Nix soon became heavily involved in the publishing industry after moving to Sydney, working his way up the corporate ladder until finally becoming a senior editor in 1991 with HarperCollins Australia.

Gary Gibson

Prior to becoming a professional writer, Gary Gibson worked for an environmental agency, but left shortly after other members of staff attempted to levitate a local bridge as a protest against road traffic. Following this, he worked as a graphic designer for a printing firm that turned out to be run by a gang of convicted forgers, hastening his departure: and then for a small publishing company otherwise notable only for producing a Freddie Mercury impersonator well-known on the Scottish cabaret circuit. Until recently he resided in Taipei with his wife, and is pleased to say that the only lunatic he has to answer to these days is himself.

Gene Rowe and Andrew Schofield

Gene Rowe was born in the exotic town of Bedford. He rapidly escaped - though only as far as Suffolk, where he was condemned to attend a rural comprehensive school. Andrew Schofield came into this world fully formed; a bit like Venus except for the beautiful bits. He too survived the state school system, shining in the subjects of skiving games, acne and chemistry.

George RR Martin

Born on the 20th September 1948, George Raymond Richard Martin began writing at a very early age; creating scary monster stories and selling them to the other children that lived in the neighbouring area. He had his first book published in 1971; the book was called The Hero and Martin was 21 years of age.

George Udenkwo

The author, George Chyke Udenkwo, was born in 1967 in the troubled town of Newry, Northern Ireland. Half Nigerian, half Irish, he was raised in 70's England and to his everlasting chagrin missed out on the Punk era by a hairs breadth. andquot;We left for Nigeria in '76, anarchy was just over the British horizon and art was about to change forever.andquot; But Nigeria was to reshape George's views in other ways.

Geraldine McCaughrean

Geraldine McCaughrean was born in London and at first intended to become a teacher. Instead she began writing after taking a job in a major publishing company. In 1987 A Little Lower than the Angels won the Whitbread Children's Novel Award. A Pack of Lies received the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction Award in 1988, and in 1994, Gold Dust was the winner of the Beefeater Children's Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Smarties Book Prize.

Giles Kristian

Born in Leicester in 1975 to an English father and Norwegian mother, Giles has led a varied and somewhat unconventional life. His rock 'n' roll singer father had nurtured a dream that would lead Giles to the bright lights of fame. His degree in English Literature and Language at UCE was cut short when he was offered a place in 90s boy band Upside Down as their lead singer. Giles has sung for H.R.H. The Prince of Wales and has performed as such venues as The Royal Albert Hall and Wembley Arena, alongside artists such as Eric Clapton, Dame Shirley Bassey, The Back Street Boys and Meat Loaf, to name a few.

Glen Cook

Glen Cook first began writing in high school, providing the occasional article for the school newspaper. After high school Cook spent time in United States Navy before working full time at a General Motors assembly plant. It was while he was at GM that Cook began writing in earnest, producing as many as three books a year. Outside of writing Glen Cook is an avid stamp collector and enjoys watching the Cardinals play baseball.

Glenda Larke

Glenda larke was born in Western Australia, the daughter of a farmer. She was educated at government state schools and the University of Western Australia, where she obtained a degree in history and a diploma in education. Married to a Malaysian scientist, she has grown-up children, and now lives in Malaysia, where she is actively involved in rainforest conservation.

Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock is the author of The Sign and the Seal, Fingerprints of the Gods, Keeper of Genesis, Heaven’s Mirror, Supernatural and other bestselling investigations of historical mysteries.

Graham Thomas

Graham Thomas lives and works in South East London. He has written five novels and is currently working on a four-part mini-cycle which fits inside a sixteen part saga.

Greg Hamerton

Greg Hamerton has always been fascinated with magic and fantasy. He lives in Cape Town where he writes in an old green shed at the end of the garden, among many books and a stone dragon called Qwert. He is an outdoors enthusiast and enjoys soaring over clouds and getting lost in the mountains on his paraglider. The Riddler’s Gift is the first novel in the Lifesong cycle.

Greg Keyes

Gregory Keyes (April 11, 1963) is an American writer of science fiction and fantasy. He is most famous for his quartet entitled The Age of Unreason, a steampunk/alchemical story starring Benjamin Franklin and Isaac Newton.

Guillermo del Toro

Guillermo del Toro was born October 9, 1964 in Guadalajara Jalisco, Mexico. Raised by his Catholic grandmother, del Toro developed an interest in filmmaking in his early teens. Later, he learned about makeup and effects from the legendary Dick Smith (The Exorcist (1973)) and worked on making his own short films. At the age of 21, del Toro executive produced his first feature, Dona Herlinda and Her Son (1986). Del Toro spent almost 10 years as a makeup supervisor, and formed his own company, Necropia in the early 1980s. He also produced and directed Mexican television programs at this time, and taught film.

Guy Gavriel Kay

Guy Gavriel Kay was born on the 7th November 1954 in Canada. He is still based out of Toronto. At the beginning of his career Gavriel Kay aided Christopher Tolkien (J.R.R. Tolkien's son) in the editing of Tolkien's great work, The Silmarillion. The pair met when at university together in Manitoba.

H David Blalock

H. David Blalock has been a writer for print and the internet in speculative fiction for more than 35 years. Inspired by the science fiction and horror writers of the early and middle 20th century, he continues to try to bring that sense of wonder and awe he felt at that reading to his audience through his stories and novels.

Harriet Goodwin

Harriet Goodwin read medieval English at Oxford University before training as a professional singer. She sang and toured with a number of acclaimed ensembles, and after the birth of her fourth child she had a vivid dream about a boy who fell through the surface of the Earth into the Underworld - thus the novel was born. Harriet lives in Staffordshire with her family.

Harry Sidebottom

Dr Harry Sidebottom teaches classical history at the University of Oxford, where he is a Fellow of St Benet's Hall and a lecturer at Lincoln College. He has an international reputation as a scholar, having published widely on ancient warfare, classical art and the cultural history of the Roman Empire. Originally from Newmarket in Suffolk, he now lives with his wife and two sons in Woodstock near Oxford.

Helen Lowe

Helen Lowe lives in Christchurch, New Zealand, and writes fantasy and sci-fi novels, poetry, and short fiction. She also does books and writer interviews for Women on Air, Plains 96.9 FM.

Helen Oyeyemi

Helen Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984 and moved to London when she was four. She is the author of the highly acclaimed novel The Icarus Girl,which she wrote while she was still at school, and two plays, Juniper's Whitening and Victimese. Her second novel, The Opposite House, was a nominee for the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.

Hobb Whittons

I was born in Lincoln, England, in 1962. My background is in teaching (English) and journalism. 'Tales of the Pahleen: Blue Fire Burning' is my first novel; the first, hopefully, of many.

Holly Black

Holly has also been a frequent contributor to anthologies, and has co-edited three of them: Geektastic (with Cecil Castellucci, 2009), Zombies vs. Unicorns (with Justine Larbalestier, 2010), and Bordertown (with Ellen Kushner, 2011). Her first collection of short fiction, Poison Eaters and Other Stories, came out in 2010 from Small Beer Press. She has just finished the third book in her Eisner-nominated graphic novel series, The Good Neighbors, and is working on Red Glove, the second novel in The Curse Workers series. White Cat, the first in the series, is out as of May 2010, and is about capers, curse magic, and memory.

HP Lovecraft

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born at 9 a.m. on August 20, 1890, at his family home at 454 (then numbered 194) Angell Street in Providence, Rhode Island. His mother was Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, who could trace her ancestry to the arrival of George Phillips to Massachusetts in 1630.

Ian C Esslemont

Ian Cameron Esslemont was born in 1962 in Winnipeg, Canada. He is best-known for his contributions to the Malazan Book of the Fallen epic fantasy series popularised by his friend and collaborator, Steven Erikson (a fellow archaeologist). Esslemont is the co-creator of the Malazan world.

Inez Kelley

I hear voices. But more than that, I see faces and stories that unfold in my mind in full vivid color and sound. I thought it was just my burden (yes, burden) until I put pencil to paper. (Yes, pencil and paper. This was a bazillion years ago before computers came into my world.) I have poor vision and have worn glasses since age three. This somewhat limited my ability to take part in sports or whatever outside. I have limited depth perception, which means I walked into my share of walls. The sun was too bright and would zero in through my lenses, blinding me. Plus, I didn’t like getting sweaty. So I would read. And did I read!

Isobelle Carmody

Isobelle Jane Carmody was born in the 16th of June 1958. She is an Australian writer of science fiction, fantasy, children's and young adult literature. Carmody began work on the highly acclaimed Obernewtyn Chronicles at the age of fourteen.

Jack Hessey

Born and raised in Mansfield, England, I am currently in full time education, and am part way through the first year of a degree course studying Zoo Biology at Nottingham Trent University. Whilst there I have met some great, interesting people and learnt a lot as most of the lectures are really interesting. Once my education is over I'd love to work either abroad in Wildlife Conservation or here in the UK at a Zoo or a Sea-life Centre whilst also continuing with my career as an author.

Jacqueline Carey

Jacqueline Carey is the bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Kushiel's Legacy series of historical fantasy novels and The Sundering epic fantasy duology.

Jaine Fenn

Jaine Fenn is a British science fiction author (with a fantasy twist). Born to middle-class parents in England, she wrote her first novel at seven, typing on her father's typewriter and illustrating it in felt tip pen. It wasn't SF, but it did feature characters having an improbably difficult time. Aged nine she found a copy of 'A Wizard of Earthsea' in a gift shop, and discovered the world of fantastical literature.

James Barclay

When I first encountered the purple and black book that was Dawnthief, written by James Barclay, a name I had never heard, I was hopeful. It was the beginning of the year and I had chosen six book number ones from six different authors that I was going to start reading. By the end of the year I had read five of the authors, but it was Barclay who claimed the number one spot for that year.

James Clemens

James Clemens was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1961. With his three brothers and three sisters, he was raised in the Midwest and rural Canada. There, he explored cornfields, tadpoles, and frozen ponds, dreaming of worlds and adventures beyond the next bend in the creek.

James Johnson

Richard ‘James Johnson’ was born in Derby, England in 1976. Having studied Graphic Design at Bedfordshire University he went on to win a prestigious Dandamp;AD first award. Developing a taste for writing early on in life, his passion for storytelling culminated in two books (he’d rather forget) at the age of twelve. In addition to his work as a writer, he’s also an accomplished Illustrator and Graphic Designer, which he also lectures on and leads a degree level course in Nottingham. The Enemy’s Son is his first novel.

James Lovegrove

James Lovegrove is the author of several acclaimed novels and books for children. Born on Christmas Eve 1965 a short story of his won a college competition. The prize was £15, and it had cost £18 to get the story professionally typed. This taught him a hard but necessary lesson in the harsh economic realities of a literary career.

James Maxey

James Maxey lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina. His novels include the superhero tales Nobody Gets the Girl and Burn Baby Burn, and the Dragon Age trilogy of Bitterwood, Dragonforge, and Dragonseed. His multi-book epic, Dragon Apocalypse, is an enthusiastic blend of the superhero and fantasy genres (Greatshadow (2012), Hush (2012) and Witchbreaker (2013).

James Palumbo

James Palumbo was born with many advantages. My family was wealthy and I had the best education, going to Eton, then Oxford. He was brought up in a beautiful house near Windsor, which now belongs to the Jordanian royal family.

James Patterson

James Patterson is the first author to have #1 new titles simultaneously on The New York Times adult and children's lists and is the only author to have five new hardcover novels debut at #1 on the list in one year — a record-breaking feat he's accomplished every year since 2005. To date, James Patterson has had nineteen consecutive #1 New York Times bestselling novels, and holds the New York Times record for most Hardcover Fiction bestselling titles by a single author (56 total), which is also a Guinness World Record.

James Roberts

My name is James Roberts, of Cyncoed, Cardiff. Some of you will know me from Cardiff High School, others from University College London where I am in the second year of my law degree. My novel, ‘Samuel Deksis and the Castle of the Kings’ is available to order in print today.

Janny Wurts

Janny Wurts is the author of Traitor's Knot and To Ride Hell's Chasm and twelve other novels, a short story collection, as well as the internationally best selling Empire trilogy, co authored with Raymond E. Feist. Her most recent title in the Wars of Light and Shadow series, Traitor's Knot, culminates more than twenty years of carefully evolved ideas. The cover images on the books, both in the US and abroad, are her own paintings, depicting her vision of characters and setting.

Jason Starr

Jason Starr was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1966. He worked as a dishwasher, telemarketer, financial reporter, publishing assistant and computer networking salesperson before publishing his first novel in 1997.

Jasper Fforde

Jasper began his career in the film industry, and for nineteen years held a variety of posts on such movies as Goldeneye, The Mask of Zorro and Entrapment. Secretly harbouring a desire to tell his own stories rather than help other people tell their's, Jasper started writing in 1990, and spent ten years secretly writing novel after novel as he strove to find a style of his own that was a no-mans-land somewhere between the warring factions of Literary and Absurd.

Jasper Kent

Jasper Kent was born in Worcestershire in 1968. He attended King Edward's School, Birmingham and went to study Natural Sciences at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, specialising in Physics.

Jayel Gibson

By her grandmotherandrsquo;s side, Jayel Gibson listened with eager anticipation as her grandmother wove traditional Celtic folklore and fairy tales into stories. These tales fascinated and captivated her imagination, greatly influencing the direction of her own writing and storytelling. This love for mythology drove Gibson to eventually craft the andldquo;Ancient Mirrors Tales,andrdquo; a series of fantasy novels that delve into an ancient, magical world where humans live alongside dragons and wizards.

JC Marino

Originally from Boston, JC has several degrees, including Criminal Justice, Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, and Creative Writing. He's written several screenplays that were optioned and/or made advanced placement in both the Nicholls and Austin Screenwriting Competitions. JC's background and experiences include Security Specialist while serving in the USAF/USANG, Knowledge Engineer for Digital Equipment Corporation, 3D Animator for Camber Corp, and Information Security Engineer for FOX.

Jeff Shanley

Jeff Shanley has been a fan of fantasy fiction since first reading J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. He was inspired by Tolkien's detailed descriptions of the history and languages of Middle-earth, which led him to creating his own. Mr. Shanley currently lives in Cooper City, Florida. Mathion was his debut novel.

Jeffrey Ford

Jeffrey Ford was born November 8, 1955 in New York. He is an American fantasy writer whose work is characterized by a sweeping imaginative power, humour, literary allusion, and a fascination with tales told within tales.

Jennifer Fallon

Jennifer Fallon was born in Carlton (a suburb of Melbourne, Australia) and lived in Caulfield until she was 11 when her father, a senior public servant, transferred to the national capital, Canberra. She lived in and around Canberra for about 8 years and went to school at Catholic Girls High School (now Mercy College) in Braddon. She is the ninth child in a family of thirteen girls.

Jerry Ibbotson

Jerry Ibbotson was born in London in 1969. He worked as a BBC radio journalist for almost ten years before leaving to run his own sound production company in 2000.

Jes Battis

Jes Battis was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and currently lives in New York City. He is a writer and academic whose research focuses on popular culture, gay and lesbian youth studies, and disability. His previous publications include Blood Relations and Investigating Farscape. He has taught English and film studies at Simon Fraser University and Hunter College, and the most recent academic project focuses on the history of gay and lesbian teen writing. Look for his forthcoming book of essays, A Dragon Wrecked My Prom: Teen Wizards, Mutants, and Heroes, with Rowman andamp; Littlefield, to be released in 2010.

Jim Butcher

Jim Butcher is a martial arts enthusiast with fifteen years of experience in various styles including Ryukyu Kempo, Tae Kwan Do, Gojo Shorei Ryu, and a sprinkling of Kung Fu. He is a skilled rider and has worked as a summer camp horse wrangler and performed in front of large audiences in both drill riding and stunt riding exhibitions.

JK Rowling

Joanne Rowling, better known and indeed, EXTREMELY well known around the world as JK Rowling was born in the town of Yate, South Gloucestershire in 1965. She is the most successful literary author of all time and her world-famous Harry Potter series has so far sold a staggering 380,000,000 copies worldwide and has been translated into over sixty different languages.

Joe Abercrombie

Joe Abercrombie was born in the famous English town of Lancaster, England, on the 31st of December 1974. He was educated at Lancaster Royal Grammar School before studying Psychology at Manchester University. Joe Abercrombie then moved to London, finding work at a TV Post-Production company. Two years later he left to become a freelance film editor, and worked documentaries, awards shows, music videos, and concerts for artists ranging from Barry White to Coldplay.

Joe Schreiber

Joe Schreiber is the author of the horror novel Death Troopers, released in October 2009. He is a well known horror writer, his works including Chasing The Dead and Eat The Dark. Death Troopers was his first, but not only contribution to the Star Wars universe. He will also be doing a prequel to the novel, which is set to be released on December 28, 2010.

Joel Shepherd

Joel Shepherd was born in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1974, but when he was seven his family moved to Perth in Western Australia. He studied film and television at Curtin University but realised that what he really wanted to do was write stories. His first manuscript was shortlist for the George Turner Prize in 1998, and Crossover was shortlisted in 1999.

John Lenahan

John Lenahan is a popular TV magician who became the first person in 85 years to be expelled from the Magic Circle. He has had a prime time BBC1 TV show called 'Secrets of Magic' and also a BBC2 series 'Stuff The White Rabbit'.

John R Fultz

John R. Fultz is the author of the Books of the Shaper trilogy. He live in the North Bay Area, California, but is originally from Kentucky. His short fiction has appeared in the anthologies WAY OF THE WIZARD (Prime Books) and CTHULHU’S REIGN (DAW Books), as well as the magazines BLACK GATE, WEIRD TALES, LIGHTSPEED, SPACE and TIME, and the comics ZOMBIE TALES and CTHULHU TALES. The graphic novel of epic fantasy, PRIMORDIA, was published by Archaia Comics as a three-issue miniseries in 2007-08.

Jon Sprunk

Jon Sprunk grew up in central Pennsylvania, the eldest of four children. He attended Lock Haven University and graduated with a B.A. in English in 1992. During his college years he developed a broader passion for literature and began his first awkward forays into fiction writing. Encouraged by professors and peers, he set out after graduation to become a serious writer. His first fantasy novel failed to find a publisher. Over the next decade he married, changed jobs, and after much soul-searching, returned to writing. After many more rejections he joined Pennwriters and attended their annual conference in 2004. He read about the art of writing and since then has seen some success. Several short stories have been published and in June 2009 he signed a multi-book contract with Pyr Books.

Jonathan Stroud

Jonathan Stroud was born in Bedford and grew up in St Albans. He always had a burning desire to write a full-length work of fiction which he would have wanted to read when he was younger, and so after graduating from York University he embarked on a publishing and writing career in the game book and non-fiction department at Walker Books. He moved to Kingfisher Publications to edit children's non-fiction, and for a time juggled working with writing; but Jonathan is now a full-time writer.

Joseph Delaney

Joseph Delaney is a retired English teacher living in Lancashire. His home is in the middle of Boggart territory and his village has a boggart called the Hall Knocker, which was laid to rest under the step of a house near the church.

JR Mitchell

JR was born on the Tweed River and grew up in Murwillumbah, Northern New South Wales. She discovered the love of fictional characters at an early age and grew up believing that fairies, goblins, dwarfs and other mystical creatures were real.

JRR Tolkien

J. R. R. Tolkien was born on the 3rd January 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa. He served in the First World War as a second lieutenant before coming down with trench fever at the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

Julia Donaldson

Born in 1948, Julia Donaldson was born and raised in North London with her younger sister, parents and extended family all sharing the family home. Her first interests were firmly rooted in music, her father being a Cello player and her mother a keen singer; herself and her sister were also members of the Children’s Opera Group. Attending Bristol University to study French and Drama, Donaldson met Malcolm, her future husband and together they busked their way around Europe, making up songs in the language of the country they were visiting, before marrying and settling in Glasgow.

Julia Knight

Julia Knight was born in 'ooh look what's that over there?'. When struck down with ME in 2004 she took up writing as a defence against daytime TV and found she couldn't give up the habit. Always fascinated with fantasy and sci fi since that first delve into Lord of the Rings, it remains one of her favourite books, to the point she has a tattoo of the Rohirrim flag. Other favourites include CJ Cherryh, especially the Chronicles of Morgaine, Terry Pratchett, Robert E Howard and Jim Butcher. When not writing she likes motorbikes, watching wrestling (it’s the muscles, sweat and baby oil combo) and exploring new ways to get a giggle out of life. Julia is a member of the T Party writers' group. Her first book, Ilfayne's Bane, is released in autumn 2009 in the USA.

Julian May

Born in Chicago, Illinois on July 10, 1931, Julian May discovered science fiction pulp magazines at the age of sixteen. She got involved in the world of science fiction fandom, exchanging letters with other fans. She eventually formalized her club as Science Fiction International and became publisher of its fanzine. At a convention she met future husband Ted Dikty (they were married from 1953 until his death in 1991) who would, in later life, serve as her editor and literary agent.

Juliet E McKenna

Juliet E McKenna is a UK author born in 1965 who, she says, was influenced at a young age by reading folk tales and Greek myths. This grew over the years until she started table top and live action role playing at university and began the creation of new games and role play events, which, she says, taught her what makes a good novel.

Juliet Marillier

Juliet Marillier was born on July the 27th, 1948 in Dunedin, New Zealand. An author of historical fantasy, she currently has eleven novels in print. Her books have won a number of awards over the years, the most recent being the 2008 Sir Julius Vogel Award for young adult novel, won by Cybele’s Secret.

Karen Brooks

Associate Professor Karen Brooks is Deputy Head of the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University in Lismore and has a PhD in cultural studies. Renowned internationally for her work on popular culture, Karen is also a dynamic and award-winning teacher.

Karen Miller

After graduating with a BA Communications from the University of Sydney she headed off to England and lived there for 3 years. When not writing she is heavily involved with the Castle Hill Players, her local community theatre group, as an actor, director, prompt, stage manager and publicity officer. Her favourite books and films include: Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate, Firefly, X-Men, Buffy, Angel, Supernatural, The Professionals, Forever Knight, Due South, The West Wing, The Shield, Sandbaggers, Homicide, Wiseguy, The Shield and The Closer. She refers to herself as an only child with an overactive imagination, 3 dogs, 2 cats and not enough hours in the day.

Karen Traviss

Karen Traviss is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of three Star Wars: Republic Commando novels: Hard Contact, Triple Zero, and True Colors; three Star Wars: Legacy of the Force novels: Bloodlines, Revelation, and Sacrifice; as well as City of Pearl, Crossing the Line, The World Before, Matriarch, and Judge.

Kate Elliott

Kate Elliott published her first novel in 1992. Her Novels of the Jaran, set in a speculative future, follow the changes in the culture of the nomadic people known as the Jaran after their first contact with the technologically more advanced society of Earth.

Kate Griffin

Kate Griffin is the name under which Carnegie Medal-nominated author, Catherine Webb, writes fantasy novels for adults.

Kathryn Meyer Griffith

Since childhood I’ve always been an artist and worked as a graphic designer in the corporate world and for newspapers for twenty-three years before I quit to write full time. I began writing novels at 21, over forty years ago now, and have had fourteen (nine romantic horror, one historical romance, one romantic suspense, one romantic time travel and two murder mysteries) previous novels and eight short stories published from Zebra Books, Leisure Books, Avalon Books, The Wild Rose Press, Damnation Books and Eternal Press

Kelly Link

Kelly Link’s stories have won three Nebula awards, a Hugo and a World Fantasy Award. She was born in Miami, Florida and once won a free trip around the world by answering the question, ‘Why do you want to go around the world?’ (‘Because you can’t go through it.’)

Kenneth Grahame

Kenneth Grahame was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 8 March 1859. Excelling in both academic and sports pursuits whilst attending St. Edward's School in Oxford, Grahame did not continue on with his dream of a university education due to financial constraints. In 1879 Grahame obtained a position within the Bank of England as a gentleman clerk but he found the routine so dulling that, from his rooms on Bloomsbury Street, turned his pen to writing stories. His first published story was titled By A Northern Furrow (1888), and his most famous short story is, still, "The Reluctant Dragon" (1898).

Kevin Brooks

Kevin Brooks always wanted to be a writer. After being turned down by a number of publishers, Kevin Brooks sent his Martyn Pig manuscript to The Chicken House, who published it in the spring of 2002. The book was short-listed for the Carnegie Medal and won a Branford Boase Award for best first novel.

Kevin Hearne

Born and raised in Arizona, Kevin Hearne attended college at Northern Arizona University, earning a degree in English Education. It was during this time that he first got the writing bug, thanks to Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He worked for the college newspaper both as an editorial cartoonist and as a feature columnist, and started a novel that he never finished. He taught high school English for three years in California before returning to teach in Arizona.

Kevin J Anderson

Kevin J Anderson was born on March 27, 1962. and is an American science fiction author with many bestsellers to his name. He has written novels for series ranging from Star Wars and StarCraft to Titan A.E and The X-Files. And with Brian Herbert is the co-author of the Dune prequels. His original works include the Saga of Seven Suns series and the Nebula Award-nominated Assemblers of Infinity.

Kevin Lane

I'm writing for adults who have full time jobs, spouses, possible offspring, and high-maintenance 'fixer-uppers' they call home. With all these responsibilities we need an occasional escape. But we cannot afford the full trappings of an alter ego in a parallel universe. We have to slip in and slip out on the sly. Get me my fantasy fix and give it to me quick. My lunch break is almost over!

Kim Newman

Kim Newman, born 1959, is an English journalist, film critic, and fiction writer. Raised in Somerset he was educated at Dr. Morgan's Grammar School in Bridgwater. He studied English at the University of Sussex. He has won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and the BSFA award.

Kristen Britain

Kristen Britain grew up in the Finger Lakes region of New York State, where she started her first novel - an undersea fantasy featuring herself and her friends - at the age of nine. She published her first book, a cartoon collection called, Horses and Horsepeople, at the age of thirteen.

Kristin Cashore

Kristin Cashore has written for The Horn Book Guide, The Looking Glass: An Online Children’s Literature Journal, and Children’s Literature in Education. She received a master’s degree in children’s literature from Simmons College. Graceling is Ms.Cashore’s first novel. She lives in Jacksonville, Florida.

KS Turner

Kate-Sarah Turner, grew up in Norwich, studied Art and Design at Central Saint Martins and Middlesex University in London, and now lives in Somerset with a posse of fluffy animals. Kate has a juxtaposition of unusual interests, from playing music to playing chess, and from sculpting bold pieces of art to studying maths.

KV Johansen

K.V. Johansen's has M.A. degrees in Medieval Studies and in English Literature. She was born in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

Laini Taylor

Laini Taylor was born 1971 in Chico, California. She moved around a lot growing up (Hawaii, Italy, Belgium, Virginia, California) and can speak some French and Italian. She graduated from Fountain Valley High School in Orange County CA in 1989 and then from UC Berkeley with a degree in English in 1994.

Larry Correia

Larry Correia is the New York Times bestselling novelist who originally self-published in 2008. His novel, Monster Hunter International, reached the Entertainment Weekly bestseller list and he received a publishing contract with Baen Books. Monster Hunter International was re-released in 2009 and made the Locus bestseller list. The sequel, Monster Hunter Vendetta, was also a New York Times bestseller, as was the third book in the series, Monster Hunter Alpha. Correia was a finalist for the John W. Campbell award for best new science fiction/fantasy writer of 2011.

Laurell K Hamilton

Laurell K Hamilton is an American author best known for two series of fantasy novels, which centre on Anita Blake, a vampire killed and animator of the dead, and Meredith Gentry, a faerie princess and private investigator.

Lauren Kate

Lauren Kate recently finished her M.A. in Creative Writing at UC Davis, where she also teaches. She lives and writes in an old farm house in Winters, California. Her first novel, The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove goes on sale one month before Fallen.

LE Modesitt Jr

LE Modesitt Jr is the bestselling author of over forty novels encompassing two science fiction series and three fantasy series, as well as several other novels in the science fiction genre.

Lev Grossman

Lev Grossman was born in 1969, the son of two English professors, and grew up in a suburb of Boston. He graduated from Harvard with a degree in literature and went on to the Ph.D. program in comparative literature at Yale, although he left after three years without finishing a dissertation.

Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll is well known throughout the world as the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Behind the famous pseudonym was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematical lecturer at Oxford University with remarkably diverse talents.

Liam Sharp

Sharp made his debut in the 1980s for the famous science fiction magazine 2000 AD after a year's apprenticeship with the legendary Don Lawrence. His works included many Judge Dredd stories and the ABC Warriors series. He then moved to Marvel UK, for which he drew the famous mini-series Death's Head II. Thereafter he began working mainly in the United States on books as diverse as X-Men, Hulk, Spider-Man, Venom, Man-Thing, Superman and Batman.

LJ Smith

Lisa Jane Smith is the NY Times Bestselling author of the Vampire Diaries and Night World series. Recently her work Dark Visions debuted as Number 1 on the list. She has written over two dozen books for children and young adults, and has enjoyed writing every one of them. She lives in the Bay Area of California, but is happiest in a little cabin near Point Reyes National Park, which has lots of trees, lots of animals, lots of beaches to walk on, and lots of places to hike. She once, while hiking with a friend, saw a snow-white buck which allowed her to follow it nearly half a mile. She also likes to collect things: tiny boxes from different countries or of fanciful shape, 1800s (and earlier) children's literature, and books about quantum physics - especially about the mystery of the dark energy in the universe. She is a militant optimist, part of the velociraptor sisterhood (a fancy way of saying that she likes to read, write and discuss books with strong female characters), and has traveled extensively in Europe and the Far East.

Lois McMaster Bujold

I was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1949. I graduated from Upper Arlington High School in 1967, and attended the Ohio State University from 1968 to 1972. I have two children, Anne, born in 1979, and Paul, born in 1981. We resided in Marion, Ohio, from 1980 to 1995, and moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1995.

Lorne Rothman

Lorne Rothman was born in 1964 in Montreal, Canada. He spent most of his childhood in Toronto, back in the day when you could live in a big city, and explore fields and farmlands just beyond your front door.

Lucinda Hare

Lucinda Hare was born in Edinburgh in 1958 and spent her childhood in rural East Lothian, where she spent much of her time roaming the beaches and woods. It was there that her lifelong passions for animals, history, reading and drawing began. She spent years daydreaming about the Roman legions, medieval knights and the American west and rather than write about the dreams and stories in her head, she drew them purely from her imagination.

Madeleine LEngle

Madeleine was born on November 29th, 1918, and spent her formative years in New York City. Instead of her school work, she found that she would much rather be writing stories, poems and journals for herself, which was reflected in her grades (not the best). However, she was not discouraged.

Maggie Furey

Maggie Furey was born in the northeast of England in 1955. Her debut fantasy series, The Artefacts of Power, was an instant success and Furey quickly became one of the most thrilling fantasy authors to have emerged from the United Kingdom in many years. The late David Gemmell described her work as “infinitely enchanting”.

Marc Gascoigne and Christian Dunn

Marc Gascoigne was the developer or editor of several classic boardgames in the mid-1980s, including Blood Bowl and Dark Future. After ten years as a freelance editor, notably for Puffin's Fighting Fantasy gamebook series, he returned to the Nottingham-based company in 1997 to help establish the Black Library fiction imprint. Starting as editor he became publisher and overall manager of the Black Library Publishing family of imprints, that now also includes Black Industries and Solaris Books. It was announced on the 11th of Sept 2008 that he had joined HarperCollins to create a new science fiction andamp; fantasy imprint to be called Angry Robot.

Marcus Alexander

After several incident-filled years of travelling the armpits of the world Marcus Alexander decided to pack in all serious attempts at reaching maturity and instead embraced the much more suitable world of parchment scribbling for a living.

Marcus Sedgwick

Marcus Sedgwick was born in Kent in 1968 and is an acclaimed children’s author and illustrator. Sedgwick is renowned for the dark-themes that he incorporates into his young-adult novels. His first book Floodland was published in 2000, winning the Branford Boase Book Award for best debut children’s novel.

Margaret Weis

Margaret Weis was born on the 16th March 1948 in Independence, Missouri and is a New York Times best-selling author of fantasy books. Missouri in the 1950s was not an ideal setting for a budding young fantasy author but the young Weis was not to be deterred and enthralled her kindergarten friends and then her classmates in school with her stories.

Margit Sandemo

Margit Sandemo is Scandinavia’s most popular author. Her flagship multi?volume fantasy?historical saga The Legend of the Ice People, now about to be published in English for the first time, has made her something of a living legend among writers because it alone has sold 25 million copies in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe.

Margo Lanagan

Margo Lanagan has worked as a kitchen hand and encyclopedia seller, and spent ten years as a freelance book editor. She is now a technical writer as well as a creative one. Ms. Lanagan's critically acclaimed North American debut, Black Juice, is a Michael L. Printz Honor Book and won two World Fantasy Awards. Black Juice also received the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards Prize for Young Adult Fiction, a Golden Aurealis Award for Best Young Adult Short Story, and a Bram Stoker Award nomination from the Horror Writers of America. The author lives in Sydney, Australia, with her partner and their two sons.

Maria V Snyder

Maria V. Snyder published her first novel Poison Study in 2006, a title which went on to win the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel. Continuing this remarkable fantasy series, Maria soon wrote Magic Study and then Fire Study, which became a New York Times Best Seller. Storm Glass, her fourth title, begins a new trilogy, continuing the magical journey of character Opal Cowen.

Marion Zimmer Bradley

Marion Zimmer Bradley was born on the 3rd June 1930 and sadly died in 1999. She was an American science fiction and fantasy author who was well known for the feminist and Christian themes within her books. Her most famous piece of work is probably The Mists of Avalon, which was in essence a retelling of an Arthurian legend from the female perspective and her Darkover novels.

Mark A Cropper

Mark A. Cropper is an English fantasy author who was born in 1947 and is still going. A self-confessed “aged hippy”, he was once a psychiatric-nurse and is now a writer.

Mark Anthony Tierno

Mark Anthony Tierno lives in Monrovia, California and is a lifelong fantasy and Sci-Fi reader. Mark completed his first novel Maldene in 1996, a novel that was finally published in 2006 following ten years of agent rejections.

Mark Chadbourn

Critics have praised Mark Chadbourn for the astonishing detail and realism he brings to his novels. The reason: the kind of research most people would go out of their way to avoid. For his first novel Underground, set in an isolated mining community, he worked hundreds of feet beneath the earth, crawling along tunnels barely two feet high, experiencing the same kind of brutal lifestyle as his coal miner characters.

Mark Charan Newton

Mark Charan Newton was born in 1981. He has a degree in Environmental Science and lives in Nottingham, UK. Charan is an Indian name (he ishalf-Indian). Newton writes for Tor UK/Pan Macmillan and his first book is Nights of Villjamur. He is represented by the John Jarrold Literary Agency.

Mark Walden

Mark Walden spent ten years designing and producing video games for a living before the Higher Institute of Villainous Education crept into his mind, and he decided to become an author. The unlikely inspiration behind the top-secret school of villainy was, in fact, a Persian Blue cat named Otto. On noticing Otto's uncanny resemblance to the cat that Blofeld owned in the James Bond films, Mark began to wonder exactly how the world's evil genius's honed their skills and where the nefarious villains of tomorrow were trained ... and so H.I.V.E. was born.

Markus Heitz

A fantasy author, most famous for his four-book Dwarves saga, Heitz has in the last couple of years gained popularity within Europe.

Martin Waddell

Born 10th April 1941 during a bombing raid on Belfast, children’s author Martin Waddell is a prolific children’s writer both under his own name and the pseudonym ‘Catherine Sefton’ which her uses for books with a more serious subject matter for older children. He now publishes all his books under his own moniker. A resident for most of his life in Newcastle, Co. Down, Martin has never shied from writing about difficult situations that children have to sometimes deal with, this was never more so reflected in his books ’Starry Night’, ‘Frankie’s Story’ and ‘The Beat of the Drum’ which addressed the difficulties, anger and grief attributed to the political troubles in Northern Ireland but from a teenager’s perspective.

Martine Leavitt

Martine Leavitt was born 1953 in Taber, Alberta, Canada. She attended the University of Calgary where she graduated with first-class honours. Her first three books (the award-winning Marmawell fantasy trilogy) were written while she was studying writing at the University of Calgary. Published under her then-name Martine Bates, the trilogy follows Marwen's adventures as she progresses to her destiny as a wizard, on the way falling in love with a prince.

Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley (1797 - 1851) was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin, and her mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.

Matt Haig

Matt Haig was born in 1975. He is the author of The Last Family in England (2004), and the forthcoming children’s novel, Shadow Forest. His website is at www.matthaig.com.

Matthew Skelton

Matthew Skelton was born in the UK but spent most of his childhood in Canada. He started writing while working as a teaching assistant at the University of Mainz and continued when he cam back to Oxford to work as a research assistant. In 2002 he won Richard and Judy’s short story competition.

MC Burnell

MC Burnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1980. She spent the next two decades roaming the nation with her family, following the romantic, itinerate lifestyle for which scientists and accountants are famed. Since then, the author has somehow acquired a number of degrees and a decent library. She currently lives with her husband in Chicago.

Melaine Bryant

Melaine Bryant knew she wanted to be a writer from the moment she learned how to hold a pencil. To the consternation of her teachers and parents, she preferred writing to paying attention in school, and spent many happy hours composing stories, books, and screenplays. She grew up immersed in The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, the stories of King Arthur, and many other fantasy books by authors such as John Christopher, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Lloyd Alexander.

Melissa and Emily Boverhof

Melissa Boverhof, age 18, and Emily Boverhof age 16, are both home school’ers from Grant Michigan; were they live with their parents, Steve and Nancy Boverhof, and their younger siblings, Lynn , age 6, and Justin, age 3.

Mervyn Peake

Mervyn Peake was born in 1911 in Kuling, Central Southern China, where his father was a medical missionary. Within a year, the family moved to the Northern city of Tientsin. Peake was educated at Tientsin Grammar School then at Eltham College in South East London. During the Second World War, whilst serving with the army, he established a reputation as a gifted book illustrator with his pictures for Ride a Cock Horse (1940), The Hunting of the Snark (1941) and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1943). Titus Groan was published in 1946 and was followed, in 1950, by Gormenghast and the third volume of the Gormenghast saga, Titus Alone, was published in 1959. His other works include Shapes and Sounds (1941), Rhymes Without Reasons (1944), Letters from a Lost Uncle (1948) and Mr Pye (1953) and a play, The Wit to Woo (1957). He died in 1958.

Michael A Stackpole

Born in USA, on 27th November 1957. Full name Michael Austin Stackpole. Writes both sf and fantasy. Best known for his Rogue Squadron Star Wars series. Awarded GAMA's Meritorious Service Award, in 1993, for work on the Game Manufacturers Association's Industry Watch Committee.

Michael Ende

Michael Ende (1929-1995) was post-war Germany’s most successful writer of children’s books. His father was a surrealist painter banned by the Nazi regime. Michael worked as an actor, film reviewer and political sketch writer and his first children’s book was published in 1960. He was criticised for filling children’s heads with escapist, fantasy stories instead of confronting them with the social realism that was believed in at the time. The attacks hurt him and he moved to Rome to live in 1971.

Michael J Sullivan

Michael J. Sullivan is an American author of epic fantasy and widely regarded as one of the most successful self-published fantasy authors. He has written two series, The Riyria Revelations, a six book epic fantasy series, and The Riyria Chronicles, an ongoing series.

Michael Moorcock

Michael Moorcock was born in London in 1939. He began to write while still at school, starting a magazine, Outlaw's Own, in 1950. He continued to produce similar fanzines until 1962. After leaving school, he began to contribute professionally to Tarzan Adventures and edited that magazine from 1957 to 1958, writing for it his first heroic fantasy series.

Michael Morpurgo

Born in 1943 Michael Morpurgo describes himself as ‘oldish’. Married to Clare, father to three children and grandfather to six he has written over 100 titles for children over the course of his career.

Michael Scott

An authority on mythology and folklore, Michael Scott is one of Ireland’s most successful authors. A master of fantasy, science fiction, horror and folklore, he has been hailed by the Irish Times as ‘the King of Fantasy in these isles’. He lives and writes in Dublin.

Michelle Moran

Michelle Moran was born in California. She worked as a teacher before her novel, Nefertiti, was published around the world in 2007. She has travelled around the world - including to Israel, where she participated in an archaeological dig that inspired her to begin writing historical fiction. She lives in Southern California.

Michelle Paver

Michelle Paver is a novelist that is best known for the six books that make up The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness. She was born in 1960 in Malawi (then known as Nyasaland) to a South African father and a Belgian mother. Her father ran and wrote for the local Nyasaland Times whilst her mother contributed the gossip column.

Mike Wilks

Londoner Mike Wilks is an award-winning artist and best-selling author of The Ultimate Alphabet and The Ultimate Noah’s Ark. His paintings, which have been described as ‘meticulous and eye-bending’, can be found in public and private collections in Europe and the USA. The Mirrorscape books transport the reader into Mike’s compelling inner world.

Myke Cole

As a security contractor, government civilian and military officer, Myke Cole’s career has run the gamut from Counterterrorism to Cyber Warfare to Federal Law Enforcement. He’s done three tours in Iraq and was recalled to serve during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Naomi Novik

Naomi Novik was born in New York in 1973, a first-generation American, and raised on Polish fairy tales, Baba Yaga, and Tolkien. She studied English Literature at Brown University and did graduate work in Computer Science at Columbia University before leaving to participate in the design and development of the computer game Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide.

Naomi Novik

Naomi Novik was born in New York in 1973, a first-generation American, and raised on Polish fairy tales, Baba Yaga, and Tolkien. She studied English Literature at Brown University and did graduate work in Computer Science at Columbia University before leaving to participate in the design and development of the computer game Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide. Over the course of a brief winter sojourn working on the game in Edmonton, Canada (accompanied by a truly alarming coat that now lives brooding in the depths of her closet), she realized she preferred the writing to the programming, and, on returning to New York, decided to try her hand at novels. Temeraire was her first.

Natalie Williams

Natalie Williams was born in 1981 in the newly born country of Zimbabwe on the purple carpeted Jacaranda Lane of African/Irish descent. Life was filled in her early years with Irish fairy tales written by her grandfather and inspirational imaginings in the world of Narnia and Grimm’s’ Fairy Tales. In the inspiring world of Africa, she began her journey as a writer winning an Honours award for her poem “The Thicket and the Musgrove” at the age of nine. Years later, she now launches her first poetry collection drawing on the inspirations of her life and imagination.

Neal Asher

Essex-born author Neal Asher was writing short science fiction for many years before he embarked on his full-length novel Gridlinked, followed by four others which have been translated into nine different languages.

Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman is one of the top ten living post-modern writers, and is a prolific creator of works of prose, poetry, film, journalism, comics, song lyrics, and drama.

Nicola Rhodes

My name is Nicola Rhodes and I am 37 years old. I live in Derbyshire, England and have been writing novels for about six years.

NK Jemisin

Nora Jemisin is an author of speculative fiction short stories and novels who lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY. In addition to writing, she is a counseling psychologist.

Oisin McGann

Born in Dublin in 1973, Oisín spent his childhood there and in Drogheda, County Louth. He started writing and illustrating stories in copybooks when he was about six or seven, setting himself on a path that would steer him well clear of ever obtaining of a proper job.

Oliver Jeffers

Oliver Jeffers is an artist, designer, illustrator and writer from Northern Ireland.

Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card is the author of the novels Ender's Game, Ender's Shadow and Speaker for the Dead, which are widely read by adults and younger readers, and are increasingly used in schools.

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 in Dublin, Ireland. After studying at Oxford University, where he had been greatly influenced by Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Movement, Wilde became a poet. His first collection, Poems, was published in 1881 and a successful tour of America followed.

Patricia Briggs

Patricia Briggs, born 1965 in Butte, Montana, is an award-winning fantasy author. Shortly after her sixth birthday, she discovered there were dwarves living in the mines and elves in the forests. The hob in the garage really startled her the first time she met him, but they've been good friends ever since. The urge to share her discoveries with the rest of the world led her to writing. She now resides in Washington state.

Patricia L ONeill

Patricia L O’Neill was born in Chicago and earned a Ph.D. in biology from the University of California at Los Angeles. After winning several national awards for her short fiction, she decided to write full time, and concentrated on historical fiction so she could combine creative writing, research skills and a scientist’s eye for unsolved mysteries.

Patricia McKillip

Patricia Anne McKillip was born on the 29th February (a leap year), 1948 in Salem, Oregon. The sea coast of Oregon instilled a great love of the sea and the cliffs and she likes nothing more than walking along the beach and admiring the views. McKillip grew up as part of a very strong family, full of love and support. Her father was an Air Force officer and Patricia found herself living with her family in Germany and England between 1958 and 1962 and this gave her an insight into the outside world and their cultures and languages, elements of which she has incorporated into her fantasy novels.

Patrick Rothfuss

Patrick Rothfuss had the good fortune to be born in Wisconsin where long winters and lack of cable television brought about a love of reading and writing. His mother read to him as a child, and his father taught him to build things. If you are looking for the roots of his storytelling, look there.

Paul Doherty

Paul Doherty was born in Middlesbrough (North-Eastern England) in 1946. He had the usual education before studying at Durham for three years for the Catholic priesthood but decided not to proceed. He went to Liverpool University where he gained a First Class Honours Degree in History and won a state scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, whilst there he met his wife Carla Lynn Corbitt. He continued his studies but decided that the academic world was not for him and became a secondary school teacher.

Paul Kearney

In the eight years subsequent to the publication of The Way to Babylon, Kearney lived in Copenhagen, New Jersey, and Cambridgeshire, but at present he makes his home a stone's throw from the sea in County Down, with his wife, two dogs, a beat-up old boat, and far too many books.

Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell

Paul Stewart was born in 1955 in London and lived for a year in Muswell Hill before moving to Morden in Southwest London, “the end of the Northern line”.

Peter J Murray

Peter J Murray was born in 1951 and brought up on a council estate in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. He left school with few qualifications, feeling ill suited to a an academic lifestyle, and followed in the family tradition of working in the dangerous steel works of Sheffield. What happened over the next 30 years is an amazing story….

Peter S Beagle

Peter S. Beagle was born in 1939 and raised in the Bronx, just a few blocks from Woodlawn Cemetery, the inspiration for his first novel, A Fine and Private Place. Today, thanks to classic works such as The Last Unicorn, Tamsin, and The Innkeeper’s Song, he is acknowledged as America’s greatest living fantasy author, and his dazzling abilities with language, characters, and magical storytelling have earned him many millions of fans around the world.

Peter V Brett

Raised on a steady diet of fantasy novels, comic books and Dungeons and Dragons, Peter V. Brett (“Peat” to his friends) has been writing fantasy stories for as long as he can remember. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature and Art History from the University at Buffalo in 1995, and then spent over a decade in pharmaceutical publishing before returning to his blissful life of fiction writing. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Danielle and two cats, Jinx and Max Powers.

Peter Ward

Peter Ward was born in 1958 and grew up in different places all over the Far East, England and Germany. Before graduating from Leeds University with a degree in English, Peter became a jack of all trades and had a varying list of employees. He is now self-employed. He lives with his wife, daughter and two sons in Putney, south-west London.

Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman was born on the 19th October, 1946 in Norwich, England. Pullman is best known for the series of books entitled His Dark Materials, the award winning children’s literature consisting of Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass.

Pierre Pevel

Pierre Pevel, born in 1968, is one of the foremost writers of French fantasy today. The author of seven novels, he was awarded the GRAND PRIX DE L'IMAGINAIRE in 2002 and the PRIX IMAGINALES in 2005, both for best novel.

R Scott Bakker

R. Scott Bakker's work is dominated by a large series informally known as The Second Apocalypse, which Bakker began developing while in college in the 1980s. The series was originally planned to be a trilogy, with the first two books entitled The Prince of Nothing and The Aspect-Emperor. The third book has been referred to as The Book That Shall Not Be Named by Bakker, since the title of this book is considered to be a spoiler for the preceding volumes. However, when Bakker began writing the series in the early 2000s, he found it necessary to split each of the three novels into its own sub-series to incorporate all of the characters, themes and ideas he wished to explore. Bakker originally conceived of seven books: a trilogy and two duologies. This later shifted to two trilogies and one duology, with the acknowledgment that the third series may yet also expand to a trilogy.

RA Salvatore

Robert Anthony Salvatore was born in Leominster, Massachusetts on January 20, 1959. A graduate of Leominster High School, Salvatore attended Fitchburg State College to study computerscience, however, he changed his major to journelism after recieving a copy of The Lord of the Rings as a Christmas gift.

Rachel Aaron

Rachel Aaron is a US fantasy author who writes the Legend of Eli Monpress series for Orbit Books. She was born and raised in Atlanta and currently lives in Athens, Georgia. She writes full time and loves reading fantasy, Romance and Science Fiction.

Rachel Haimowitz

Rachel is a freelance writer and editor who's dipped her toes into cable news and book publishing and now helps would-be authors polish and publish, writes for websites and magazines, and ghostwrites nonfiction. Her professional interests vary widely; she's a Contributing Editor to Construction Source Magazine, a political/media blogger at the Huffington Post, a ghostwriter in the small business and motivational space, and a writer of niche erotica.

Ramsey Campbell

Ramsey Campbell has won multiple British Fantasy and World Fantasy Awards and several Bram Stokers and International Horror Guild Awards. He is the author of such classic works of horror and dark fantasy as Obsession, The Face Must Die, The Nameless, Incarnate and The Influence, and more recently The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight and The Grin of the Dark.

Raymond E Feist

Raymond E. Feist (the E. stands for Elias) was born in Los Angeles, California in the year that the Second World War ended (1945). Feist was born with the surname Gonzales but was subsequently adopted by Felix E. Feist and took the Feist surname for his own.

Rebecca Maizel

Rebecca Maizel graduated from Boston University and the Rhode Island College master’s program. She teaches community college in Rhode Island and is studying to receive her MFA from Vermont College.

Reggie Oliver

Reggie Oliver has been a professional playwright, actor, and theatre director since 1975.

RF Long

R.F. Long always had a thing for fantasy, romance and ancient mysteries. The combination was bound to cause trouble. In university she studied English Literature, History of Religions and Celtic Civilisation, which just compounded the problem.

Ricardo Pinto

Ricardo Pinto is Portuguese, but has lived and studied in Scotland since he was a child. Previously he designed and programmed computer games. He lives in Edinburgh.

Richard A Knaak

Richard A. Knaak was born in Chicago on May 28, but now splits his time between Chicago and Arkansas. He has been published since 1987 and his works have been translated into German, Italian, French, Danish, Japanese, Spanish, Polish, Finnish, Czech, Hungarian, Turkish, and Russian.

Richard Adams

Richard Adams was born in Berkshire in 1920 and studied history at Bradfield and Worcester College, Oxford. He served in the Second World War and in 1948 joined the Cicil Service. In the mid-sixties he completed his first novel, Watership Down, the story of which he originally told to his children to while away a long car journey. Watership Down was awarded both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian award for children's fiction for 1972.

Richelle Mead

Richelle Mead is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of urban fantasy books for both adults and teens.

Rick Riordan

Rick Riordan is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Percy Jackson and the Olympians series for children and the multi-award-winning Tres Navarre mystery series for adults.

Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl was born in Llandaff, Wales on September 13th 1916. His parents were Norwegian and he was the only son of a second marriage. His father, Harald, and elder sister Astri died when Roald was just three. His mother, Sofie, was left to raise two stepchildren and her own four children (Alfhild, Roald, Else and Asta). Roald was her only son. He remembered his mother as “a rock, a real rock, always on your side whatever you’d done. It gave me the most tremendous feeling of security”. Roald based the character of the grandmother in THE WITCHES on his mother – it was his tribute to her.

Rob Thurman

Robyn Thurman writes under the name of Rob Thurman and is a New York Times best selling American novelist. She is currently writing three series for Penguin Putnam's imprint Roc Fantasy, as well as a brand-new mainstream series for Simon and Schuster's Pocket Books. Her work is dark, non-stop action from beginning to end, rife with purely evil sarcasm as sharp as a switchblade - and probably nearly as illegal. If one shoved Lord of the Rings, The Shining, and Pulp Fiction into a wood-chipper, the result would be what she aims to deliver in a novel or short story.

Robert C Auty

Robert enjoyed reading fantasy fiction for years before first trying his hand at writing in 1998. Rather than Tolkien, it was his favourite authors David Gemmel and David Eddings that have given him inspiration for his novels.

Robert E Howard

Robert Ervin Howard was born on the 22nd of January 2006. He is best known as the creator of both Conan the Barbarian and the sword and sorcery sub-genre of fantasy. Kevin Lane, author of the highly recommended Glammenport, explains why Howard’s Conan books are a must read for any fan of sword and sorcery novels.

Robert Holdstock

Robert Holdstock was born in Hythe, Kent. He became a full-time writer during 1976 and lived out the rest of his life in North London. He died in hospital at the age of 61, following his collapse with an E. coli infection. His breakthrough novel Mythago Wood was published during 1984. The book marked the beginning of the Ryhope Wood series and is recognized as Holdstock's first major fantasy work. From 2001 to 2007 he produced a trilogy of fantasy novels, the Merlin Codex, consisting of Celtika, The Iron Grail and The Broken Kings.

Robert Jordan

Robert Jordan was born on the 17th of October 1948 in Charleston, South Carolina. In 2006 he was diagnosed with the rare blood disease amyloidosis and died on September the 16th, 2007. Jordan will be best remembered for his best-selling fantasy series, The Wheel of Time, with 14 million copies having been sold in North America alone.

Robert Le Normand

Robert Le Normand was born in Jersey in June 1954. His parents left the island when he was very young.. They settled in Gloucestershire where Robert was educated at various schools.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850, into a family of famous lighthouse engineers. Robert soon realised that engineering was not for him; on trips with his father around the Scottish coast he instead discovered a love of adventures and stories, and by the age of twenty-one he decided to become a writer. His first books were accounts on his travels around Europe, but he later went on to write fiction, notably the children’s novel Treasure Island – featuring parrots, pirates and Long John Silver – and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, an early psychological thriller set in London.

Robert Olen Butler

Robert Olen Butler has published eleven novels and five volumes of short fiction, one of which, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His Pulitzer book is comprised of stories in the voices of Vietnamese exiles in the United States and draws on the rich mythic storytelling traditions of the Vietnamese culture.

Robert Shearman

Robert Shearman has worked as a writer for television, radio and the stage. He was appointed resident dramatist at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter and has received several international awards for his theatrical work, including the Sunday Times Playwriting Award, the World Drama Trust Award and the Guinness Award for Ingenuity in association with the Royal National Theatre. His plays have been regularly produced by Alan Ayckbourn, and on BBC Radio by Martin Jarvis. However, he is probably best known as a writer for Doctor Who, reintroducing the Daleks for its BAFTA winning first series, in an episode nominated for a Hugo Award.

Robert Stanek

Robert Stanek was born on the 3rd January 1966 in Burlington, Wisconsin in the United States of America. His father emigrated to the U.S.A. from Budapest in Hungary.

Robert von Stein Redick

Robert von Stein Redick also had the good fortune to live, work and travel extensively in Latin America, particularly Argentina and Colombia. In Cali, Colombia he worked with a human rights foundation and taught in a bilingual school. In Argentina he interviewed park rangers, park administrators, superintendents and biologists across the country, and wrote an extensive study of ranger training and park management practices. His novel, Conquistadors, is set during the Argentinian dictatorship of the late 1970s. The book was a finalist for the 2002 AWP/Thomas Dunne Novel Award.

Robert Ward

Robert Ward was born in Baltimore in 1943. In his senior year in college he wrote a short story which won a school literary prize called “The Value of Evolon.” After getting his MFA degree Ward got a job teaching at Miami University-Hamilton Campus in Hamilton Ohio. He had finished re-writing his novel, Shedding Skin, about his travels, and lunatic adventures, and it was accepted for publication by Harper and Row in 1968. Upon hearing of an opening for a teaching job at Hobart and William Smith College, Ward sent his novel to the head of the creative writing program, James Crenner. Crenner wrote him back saying that he thought the book was one of the greatest novels he’d ever read, and invited him to Geneva for an interview. Though his novel came out and won an NEA Grant as one of the best novels published in 1972, his attempt at a second book was a disaster, and he began to take opiates and drink whiskey to dull the pain of his total and his absolute failure of nerve.

Robin Hobb

Robin Hobb is a US fantasy writer, best known for her trilogies set in The Realm of the Elderlings. Readers were first introduced to that world with the publication of Assassin’s Apprentice, the first volume of The Farseer Trilogy, in 1995. The story is told in the first person from the point of view of FitzChivalry Farseer, an illegitimate scion of the royal family, during a time when the Six Duchies are being attacked by warships from the OutIslands. The boy grows up being trained as an assassin, but soon claims a place as a warrior as well. The influence of an enigmatic prophet, the Fool, forces young Fitz into a role that will influence the destiny of the entire Six Duchies. The trilogy was completed with Royal Assassin in 1996 and Assassin’s Quest in 1997. All three were nominated for the British Fantasy Society’s 'best fantasy' award. First published in the US, the books quickly appeared in the UK and Australia as well, and are now widely translated throughout the world, including France, Spain, Israel, China, Russia, The Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, and Japan.

Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams

Roderick Gordon was born, grew up and went to university in London. He worked in corporate finance in the City until 2001. He counts a number of writers and poets among his ancestors such RD Blackmore, Philip Doddridge and Matthew Arnold plus two paleontologists and celebrated eccentrics, William and Frank Buckland. He recently moved with his family from London to north Norfolk.

Roger Zelazny

Roger Joseph Zelazny was born in Ohio on May the 13th, 1937. Zelazny's most celebrated fantasy works are The Amber Chronicles. He has inspired younger fantasy writers, with George R. R. Martin and Neil Gaiman being heavily influenced by his work.

Rowena Cory Daniells

Rowena Cory Daniells is passionate about writing. Her speculative fiction stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies including Dreaming DownUnder which won World Best Fantasy and Dreaming Again.

Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1937). Poet, short-story writer, journalist and imperialist, Rudyard Kipling’s work remains one of the best accounts of the British colonial experience in India.

Russell Kirkpatrick

Russell lectures in Geography and manages a small map-making business. He lives in New Zealand with his wife and two children.

SA Rule

Sue Rule was born on the outskirts of Croydon, and now lives in Edenbridge, Kent. As well as being an author, she is a songwriter and musician: one quarter of family folk group Pig’s Ear.

Sara Douglass

Sara Douglass grew up in South Australia. After working as a nurse‚ she completed three degrees at the University of Adelaide‚ including a PhD in early modern English history. She worked as a Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at La Trobe University‚ Bendigo. Sara now lives in Tasmania and is a full?time writer ?? and gardener.

Sarwat Chadda

Sarwat Chadda’s love of storytelling began with his first game of Dungeons and Dragons. Face-to-face with his friends he spent long nights creating dark tales of adventure, weaving in real history, myths and legends from all sources, but most heavily from the Crusades. His passion is for the epic heroes of that period like Saladin and Richard the Lionheart, the paragons of Islam and Christendom. It was the Crusades that gave birth to the Knights Templar, so it was inevitable their mysterious history would be at the heart of his modern interpretation.

Scott Lynch

I was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on April 2, 1978, the first of three brothers. I've lived in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area my entire life; currently, I'm just across the border in Wisconsin, about half an hour east of the Twin Cities.

Scott Oden

Scott Oden was born in Columbus, Indiana, in 1967. The youngest of five, he was raised in rural North Alabama, near Huntsville, where he still resides. Scott's fascination with Egypt and the ancient world began in 1976, when his third-grade teacher showed the class slides from the traveling Tutankhamun exhibit. He studied history and English at Calhoun College and the University of Alabama before pursuing the usual variety of odd jobs—from delivering pizza to working in the bindery of a printing company to clerking at a video store.

Scott Westerfeld

Scott Westerfeld an author of science fiction novels for adults as well as an occasional ghostwriter. He has also written three sets of books for young adults, the first called Midnighters, a tale of five teenagers born on the stroke of midnight, for whom time freezes every night, revealing a dark and terrible hidden world.

Sean Beech

I have heard it said that authors draw inspiration from their own personal life experiences and if this is the case then perhaps you can see the links. I was born in Elgin, Scotland, my father having been posted there with the Royal Navy. We emigrated to South Africa when I was one and spent the next six years of my life there. My mother brought us back to Scotland when I was seven and it was there, in the North East that I fell in love with nature, castles and mountains.

Sergey Lukyanenko

Sergey Lukyanenko is a young Russian science fiction and fantasy writer (born in Kazakhstan and educated as a psychiatrist) who first saw print at the end of the eighties. Strongly influenced by Robert Heinlein and Vladislav Krapivin, he quickly enough established himself as an independent and professional writer and became well-known after writing the novel Knights of the Forty Islands.

Seth Hunter

Seth Hunter is the pseudonym of the author of a number of highly acclaimed and prize-winning adult and children`s novels, Paul Bryers. He has written and directed many historical dramas for television, radio and the theatre and adapted and directed films by playwrights such as Arthur Miller and Michael Bulgakov. He lives in London and is a member of The Writers Guild of Great Britain, the Director`s Guild and PEN.

Shannon Delany

Shannon Delany has written stories since she was a child. She began writing in earnest when her grandmother fell unexpectedly ill during a family vacation. In 2008 her greatly abbreviated version of 13 to Life (written in just five weeks) won the grand prize in the first-ever cell phone novel contest in the western world through Textnovel.com.

Sharon Shinn

I’ve been writing stories and poems since I was eight years old. My first poem was about Halloween: What is tonight? What is tonight?/Try to guess and you’ll guess right. Perhaps this inauspicious beginning explains why it took me till I was in my thirties to sell a novel. It occurred to me early on that it might take some time and a lot of tries before I was able to publish any of my creative writing, so I pursued a degree in journalism at Northwestern University so I’d be able to support myself while I figured out how to write fiction.

Shelley E Parker

Shelley E. Parker was born on 5th December 1971 in Whiston Hospital, Merseyside.She is a proud Sagittarian and Liverpool F.C. supporter.

Simon P Edwards

As well as being an author, Simon is a truly ardent fantasy fan too, and has been since he could read. From the heady heights of the Enid Blyton of his childhood years to Feist, Tolkien and Gemmell as a teenager, and now in his (early!) forties, anything that he can purloin for his voracious mind - from Peter V. Brett to Steven Erikson. They have all been devoured – the poor chaps!

SJ Day

S. J. Day‘s resume includes a variety of odd jobs ranging from amusement park employee to Russian linguist/interrogator for the U.S. Army Military Intelligence. She’s presently a full-time writer. A native Southern Californian, S.J. thinks there’s no place like home, but she loves to travel. Her adventures have taken her to Japan, Holland, Germany, France, Mexico, Jamaica, and all over the United States. She’s now hard at work on her next book.

SJA Turney

I’m a thirty-mumble-mumble year old child living in God’s own country of North Yorkshire. Educated (if you can call it that) at a Grammar School in the days of corporal punishment and uniforms (not the latex nurse variety either.) Went to Teesside Polytechnic (as it was then) to study computing and took almost a year to realise that I was mathematically inept and unable to add small numbers of beans. Actually that’s not true. My mental arithmetic is pretty damn good, just don’t ask me to divide them by ‘x’ or take a median. There ends my mathematical ability. They tried to teach me about ’sin’ ‘cos’ and ‘tan’ but I retain the belief that they mean ‘naughty thoughts’ ‘island off Greece’ and ‘possible skin cancer’. My next step was to go to Keele University to study Classical History. I enjoyed it and it’s definitely my forte, though I did spend most of my time studying both ‘Marlboro’ and ‘Famous Grouse’ rather more closely than Aeschylus. Consequently I never finished that degree.

Stephen Deas

Stephen Deas is an electrical engineer working in the aerospace and defence industries. His first novel THE ADAMANTINE PALACE has sold in a number of countries - it was sold in the US after a fierce auction and was pre-empted in Germany.

Stephen Donaldson

Stephen R. Donaldson was born on the 13th May 1947 in Cleveland, Ohio. His father, James, was a medical missionary and his mother, Ruth, a prosthetist (a person skilled in making or fitting prosthetic devices). Donaldson spent the years between the ages of 3 and 16 living in India where his father was working as an orthopaedic surgeon. Donaldson was educated at the College of Wooster and the Kent State University, being awarded a Bachelor's and Master's degree respectively. Stephen Donaldson's work is heavily influenced by other fantasy authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien, Roger Zelazny, Joseph Conrad, Henry James and William Faulkner. Stephen Donaldson currently lives in New Mexico.

Stephen King

Stephen King, the American author of horror and fantasy books was born in Portland in 1947. His first writing steps were taken when attending the University of Maine, he wrote a column for the school's newspaper.

Stephen Lawhead

Stephen Lawhead is an American author of mythic history and imaginative fiction. Born 1950, in Nebraska, he earned a university degree in Fine Arts and attended theological seminary for two years.

Stephen Zimmer

Stephen Zimmer was born in Denver Colorado on July 2, 1974. After graduating from Hardin-Simmons University with a degree in Visual Communications, Stephen embarked on path that took him into several areas of the entertainment industry, including running a video production company, an independent record label, managing music artists, and organizing a successful music conference and film festival. During this time he also directed short films, commercials, and a documentary feature on the subject of Lyme Disease called “A Time for Truth”. Stephen moved into full time writing and directing in 2004.

Stephenie Meyer

Stephenie Meyer was born on the 24th of December 1973 in Hartford, Connecticut. She grew up in Phoenix, Arizona and was one of six children. The unusual spelling of her name came from her father, Stephen (+ ie). Stephenie Meyer graduated from Brigham Young University with a bachelor's degree in English.

Steve Augarde

Steve Augarde was born in Birmingham, but spent most of his life in the West Country, working as an illustrator, paper-engineer, and semi-pro jazz musician. He has written and illustrated over 70 picture-books for younger children, and has produced the paper-engineering for many pop-up books, including those by other artists - as well as providing the artwork and music for two animated BBC television series. His first book for older children, The Various, won a Silver Smarties Award in 2003.

Steven Erikson

Steven Erikson was born on the 7th October 1959 in Toronto, Canada. Erikson is his writing name, his real name being Steve Rune Lundin. Educated in Canada, he trained in both archaeology and anthropology before graduating from the acclaimed Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Steven Erikson has a wife and son; they spent a fair part of their lives living in Great Britain before once again returning to his native Canada and the city of Winnipeg.

Susanna Clarke

Susanna Clarke was born in Nottingham, England in 1959, a Methodist Minister’s eldest daughter. Oxford educated (philosophy, politics and economics at St Hilda’s College), she is best known (so far) for her award winning novel Jonathan Strange andamp; Mr Norrell, which was published in 2004.

Susanna Gregory

Susanna Gregory is a pseudonym. Before gaining her PhD at the University of Cambridge, she was a police officer in Yorkshire. She has written a number of non-fiction books on architecture and travel as well as the chronicles of Matthew Bartholomew and Thomas Chaloner.

Suzanne Collins

Thinking one day about Alice in Wonderland, she was struck by how pastoral the setting must seem to kids who, like her own, lived in urban surroundings. In New York City, you’re much more likely to fall down a manhole than a rabbit hole and, if you do, you’re not going to find a tea party. What you might find...? Well, that’s the story of Gregor the Overlander, the first book in her five-part fantasy/war series, The Underland Chronicles.

Tad Williams

Tad Williams is a Californian born author of fantasy novels. He grew up around Stanford University in a town called Palo Alto and was encouraged to be creative by his parents.

Tamora Pierce

Tamora Pierce was born on December 13, 1954, in South Connellsville, Pennsylvania. When Pierce was five, her parents moved her and her two younger siblings to Dunbar, Pennsylvania, where her uncle provided her with her first books— Winnie the Pooh and The Cat in the Hat—and fostered her love of reading. Pierce, fascinated by Star Trek and The Lord of the Rings, began to focus on creating her own imaginary lands, unusual characters, and, what other fantasy novels failed to include—teenage female warriors.

Tanith Lee

Tanith Lee was born in London, England, in 1947. Following the completion of her secondary education, she was employed in a variety of jobs, including file clerk, assistant librarian, shop assistant and waitress. She also attended art college for one year, but quickly came to the conclusion that she would rather express herself through words than pictures.

Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire on 17th August 1930 His first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published by Faber in 1957, and was followed by many volumes of poetry and prose for both children and adults. Hughes was married to American poet Sylvia Plath from 1956 until 1963 when Plath committed suicide. He was the Poet Laureate from 1984 and was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1998, the year in which he died.

Teel James Glenn

Teel James Glenn is a native of Brooklyn though he’s traveled the world for thirty years as a Stuntman/ Fight choreographer/ Swordmaster, Jouster, Book Illustrator, Storyteller, Bodyguard and Actor. He was head instructor at the Hollywood Stunts professional stunt training center in New York and teaches stage sword privately. He is a veteran of forty-seven renaissance faires, scores of films (such as Lord of the G-Strings and Jersey Justice) and hundreds of T.V. appearances. Currently he stars as the masked cage fighter Vega (with a Castilian accent) in the international web series Street Fighter: the Later Years and in the forth coming T.V. sequel Street Fighter: Reunion and plays the claymore wielding Scottish pirate Hamish(with a Galsgow (sic) accent) in the forthcoming pirate feature film The High Seas. At home he speaks pure gibberish. His greatest achievement however, is his awesome daughter Aislin Rose who is well spoken indeed.

Terry Brooks

Terry Brooks was born in Illinois in 1944, where he spent a great deal of his childhood and early adulthood dreaming up stories in and around Sinnissippi Park, the very same park that would eventually become the setting for his bestselling Word and Void trilogy. He went to college and received his undergraduate degree from Hamilton College, where he majored in English Literature, and he received his graduate degree from the School of Law at Washington and Lee University.

Terry Goodkind

Terry Goodkind was born in 1948 and raised in Nebraska in the United States. Goodkind, slightly unusually for an author, suffers from dyslexia. He worked as a carpenter and a rare artifact restorer and painted some beautiful marine and wildlife paintings.

Terry Moore

The first issue of Strangers In Paradise was published by Antarctic Press in November 1993. It was the first comic book ever drawn by Terry Moore. Moore had conceived of the idea for SIP while trying to develop a comic strip for newspaper syndication. After repeated failures, Moore visited a comic book store and discovered the new wave of small press publishers enjoying success in the comic book field. He spent a year researching the comic book business while writing and drawing the first issue of his story.

Terry Pratchett

The English fantasy author, Terry D. J. (David John) Pratchett was born on the 28th April 1948 in the town of Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. His was educated at High Wycombe Technical High School.

TH White

T.H. White was born in Bombay, India, in 1906, educated at Cheltenham College, Gloucestershire, England, and graduated with first class honors in English from Queen's College, Cambridge, in 1928. He was a novelist, a satirist, and a social historian who probably was best known for his brilliant adaptation of Sir Thomas Malory's 15th-century romance, Morte d’Arthur, into the quartet of novels called The Once and Future King.

Thaisa Frank

The fiction of Thaisa Frank, according to the New York Times, works by a tantalizing sense of indirection.

Thomas E Sniegoski

Thomas E. Sniegoski is the author of more than two dozen novels for adults, teens, and children. His teen fantasy YA series, The Fallen, was adapted into a trilogy of monstrously successful TV movies by ABC Family Channel. His other books for teens include Sleeper Code, Sleeper Agenda, Legacy, and Force Majeure, as well as the series The Brimstone Network. The author's first adult novel, A Kiss Before the Apocalypse, hit the shelves in 2008, followed by Dancing on the Head of a Pin (2009) and Where Angels Fear to Tread (2010).

Tim Lebbon

Tim Lebbon was born in London in 1969. He has been writing ever since he can remember. The first story he recalls actually finishing was when he was nine years old. It involved a train hijacking, and one of the hijackers being clumsy enough to drop his gun. Naturally the hero found the gun and went on a killing spree. Die Hard on the 10:17 from Paddington.

Tim Powers

Tim Powers was born in 1952; the son of an attorney. He graduated from California State University in 1976 and since then has written more than a dozen highly acclaimed and award-winning novels, including the Fantasy Masterwork THE DRAWING OF THE DARK.

Tom Lloyd

Tom Lloyd was born in 1979 and showed almost no interest in writing until the age of eighteen. I blame the teachers myself. Nevertheless he did eventually find himself with a long summer to spare before university, and decided to start a novel when it was suggested he get a job to pass the time. This tells you much of what there is to know about him. The rest can be derived from the fact that he first had the idea of writing a book to annoy a school friend by getting published before him.

Tony Chandler

Tony Chandler, a Georgia native, dreamed of writing ever since he could read. As a child, he often wondered if could write a book that could stir the emotions as his had so often been stirred.

Tony Mitton

Raised in a military family, Anthony Robert Mitton was born Tripoli, North Africa in 1951 and spent the first part of his life here and in Germany and Hong Kong. It was not until he was nine that he came to Britain to attend a Suffolk boarding school. He continued his further education at Cambridge University, eventually gaining a BA in English. Tony Mitton also trained as an English teacher before eventually deciding on teaching at primary school level, which he did from the age of 25, however, by the age of 36 he was teaching on a part-time basis in order to share the parenting of his now two children with his wife, and had begun writing poetry and reading book stories for schools. His teaching career had also changed and he was now found himself working almost exclusively with children with special needs, especially those with literacy and behavioural problems. It was not until he was 40 that he began writing for children in earnest and it was in his late forties that Mitton gave up teaching altogether to concentrate full time on his writing.

Tristan Parrish

Tristan Parrish was born Michael Woodhead, 7 April 1947, in the township of Rawtenstall, Lancashire, England.

Trudi Canavan

Trudi Canavan was born on the 23rd October 1969 in Melbourne, Australia. She won the Aurealis Award for her fantasy short story Whispers of the Mist Children in 1999 and has never looked back. In 2001 she further established herself as a fantasy writer of rare talent with The Magician's Guild, the first book in a trilogy which included The Novice and The High Lord.

TS Church

Tom (T.S.) Church writes books based on the hugely popular online world of RuneScape, published by Jagex Ltd.

Ursula Le Guin

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born on the 21st October 1921 in California and is an American author of novels, poetry and short stories. She has won numerous awards during her distinguished career, notably the Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master award in 2003.

Veronica Holdgate

Veronica Holdgate was born and spent her younger years in Brighton Sussex, England.

Veronica Roth

Veronica Roth is a graduate of Northwestern University's creative writing program. While a student, she often chose to work on the story that would become Divergent instead of doing her homework. Now a full-time writer, she lives near Chicago.

Virginia Chandler

Virginia Chandler grew up in a family in which reading and writing were much loved activities. Very early on, she found herself immersed in the works of the masters of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Burroughs, and JRR Tolkien. As the years passed, she developed a fondness for Anglo Saxon literature; especially, the Medieval text, Beowulf. This interest followed her into her academic career during which she had the opportunity to study medieval history and literature at Keble and Jesus College, Oxford. Since that time, she has continued her work as an Arthurian academic.

Vonda N McIntyre

Vonda N. McIntyre is an American science-fiction and fantasy author. Her work has won numerous awards with the first coming in 1973 with the Nebula Award for the novelette Of Mist, and Grass and Sand. The Exile Waiting, McIntyre's first full-length novel was published in 1975, after which came a number of Star Trek novels and a single Star Wars novel.

Walter E Mark

Walter E. Mark was raised in central Ohio. A graduate of Malone College in Canton, Ohio and of Massilon Baptist College in Massillon, Ohio, he holds a masters degree in Education and a bachelors degree in English. Formerly a high school teacher of twenty years, he and his wife Wendy now live in New Boston, Michigan where he is employed as a computer technician. They have a daughter and a son. Walter has written short stories, dappled in poetry and written novels.

Will Peterson

Will Peterson is the pseudonym of Mark Billingham and Peter Cocks. Mark is an acclaimed, award-winning author of numerous bestselling crime novels, while Peter is a popular children’s TV writer and performer. As TV writers, Mark and Peter have worked together on many much-loved programmes such as Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, Knight School and The Cramp Twins.

William Goldman

William Goldman is a successful novelist, film scenarist, playwright, critic, and children's book author who focuses much of his attention on the illusions by which men and women live. These illusions often make existence more miserable than it need be and provide a core from which all of Goldman's protagonists seek to escape. Ironically, what they escape to is more often than not other illusions, which, because of the artificial distinctions society attaches to them, rarely satisfy their human needs.

William Horwood

William Horwood is an English author born in Oxford on the 12th of May 1944. The works for which he is best known are the best-selling Duncton Mole trilogies and the sequels to Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.

Yann Martel

Yann Martel was born in Salamanca, Spain, in 1963, of Canadian parents. His first book, The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios and other stories, was published in 1993 and is a collection of short stories, dealing with such themes as illness, storytelling and the history of the twentieth century; music, war and the anguish of youth; how we die; and grief, loss and the reasons we are attached to material objects.

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