Alastair Reynolds biography

Alastair Reynolds was born March 13, 1966 in Barry, Wales.

"I was born in Barry, a one-time boom town during the days when Wales exported coal all over the world. For years Barry was also known to people in the rest of the country as a seaside resort, drawing holidaymakers from places such as Birmingham, for which it provided the closest access to the sea. Barry's glory days were long past by the time I arrived on the scene in 1966, but I liked it all the same and have always felt fond of the place. Barry also played host to a huge scrapyard full of abandoned steam engines, which probably accounts for my abiding affection for locomotives and our wider industrial heritage."

A science fiction writer who has been published since 1990, he specialises in dark hard science fiction and space opera. Reynolds read physics and astronomy at Newcastle before earning a PhD from St Andrews, Scotland. In 1991, he moved to Noordwijk in the Netherlands where worked for the European Space Research and Technology Centre, part of the European Space Agency, until 2004 when he left to pursue writing full-time.

"I have a background in astronomy. I spent the twelve years leading up to 2004 as a scientist within the European Space Agency, of which about half that time was spent working on S-Cam, the world's most advanced optical camera. After spending sixteen years in the Netherlands, I returned to my native Wales in 2008."

Awards

• 2001 British Science Fiction Award for Best Novel (Chasm City)
• Japanese National Science Fiction Convention's Seiun Award for Best Translated Short Fiction (Weather)
• Sidewise Award for Alternate History (The Fixation)

"He remains as devoted as ever to innovative, hard sf, gigantic, family-sized space opera. What ensues is a chase story across vast tracts of both time and space, veering closer to Iain M Banks's territory than Reynolds's earlier books ventured. Like its technology, when it starts moving, it moves at one hell of a clip." The Telegraph