The Salon: It’s A Crime

Jon Courtenay Grimwood was born in Malta and christened in the upturned bell of a ship. He grew up in the Far East, Britain and Scandinavia. Apart from novels he writes for magazines and newspapers. For a while he wrote a monthly review column for The Guardian.

Felaheen, the third of his novels featuring Asraf Bey, a half-Berber detective, won the BSFA Award for Best Novel. So did his last book, End of the World Blues, about a British sniper on the run from Iraq and running an Irish bar in Tokyo. The Fallen Blade, the first of three novels set in an alternate 15th-century Venice has just been released.

His work is published in French, German, Spanish, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Russian, Turkish, Japanese, Finnish and American, among others

He is married to the journalist and novelist Sam Baker, currently editor-in-chief of Red magazine. They divide their time between London and Winchester…

Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a Computer Engineer. In her spare time, she writes speculative fiction: her short stories have appeared in venues such as Asimov’s and the Year’s Best Science Fiction. Her series of Aztec fantasy mysteries, Obsidian and Blood, is published by Angry Robot — the second volume, Harbinger of the Storm, was recently released.

Visit http://aliettedebodard.com for more information.

Mike Carey was born in Liverpool, but moved to London in the eighties after completing an English degree at Oxford. He taught English and Media for several years before resigning to become a freelance writer in 2000.

After working for several UK and American indie publishers, Mike got his big break when he successfully pitched the Lucifer ongoing series to DC Comics’ Vertigo division. Spinning off from Neil Gaiman’s ground-breaking Sandman series, Lucifer told the story of the devil’s exploits after resigning from Hell to run a piano bar in Los Angeles: Mike wrote the book for the entirety of its seven-year run, during which he was nominated for four Eisner awards and won the Ninth Art and UK National Comics awards.

A critically acclaimed run on DC/Vertigo’s flagship title, Hellblazer, led to Mike coming into the forefront of the comic field: working for Marvel, Harris and Virgin Comics as well as DC, he has written such iconic characters as Batman, Vampirella, Red Sonja, Elektra and the Fantastic Four, and currently writes X-Men Legacy for Marvel. Mike also wrote the Marvel Comics adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Shadow, and has recently launched a creator-owned book at Vertigo, The Unwritten, which has twice made the New York Times graphic novel bestseller list.

The Felix Castor novels are Mike’s first foray into prose fiction. Five have already been published in the UK, subsequently going into reprint several times, and three in the US. The series will run for a minimum of six novels in all. Mike is working on a movie screenplay commissioned by UK’s Slingshot Studios and a game, X-Men: Destiny, for Activision.