Christopher Priest was born in Cheadle, Cheshire, England, worked as an accountant and audit clerk, and was employed at a greeting card company and mail-order book publisher, before switching to full-time writing in 1968.
Priest's first story, "The Run", appeared in 1966, and first novel Indoctrinaire in 1970. His SF novels, which tend to be dark and structurally complex, also include Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972);
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Photo by Beth Gwinn
Official Website
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BSFA Award winner Inverted World (1974); Ditmar winner The Space Machine (1976); A Dream of Wessex (1977); Ditmar winner The Affirmation (1981); The Glamour (1984); The Quiet Woman (1990); World Fantasy Award winner The Prestige (1995), soon to become a feature film; BSFA winner The Extremes (1998); and The Separation (2002), which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the BSFA Award, and the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire. He's collected short fiction in Real-Time World (1974), An Infinite Summer (1979), and The Dream Archipelago (1999).
He was nominated in the Non-Fiction Hugo category for The Book on the Edge of Forever, an expansion of his pamphlet about Harlan Ellison's as-yet-unpublished anthology The Last Dangerous Visions. He's also edited anthologies Anticipations (1978) and Stars of Albion (1979, with Robert Holdstock), been an editor of Foundation (1974-77), and lectured on science fiction and writing at the University of London and Deakin University in Australia.
Priest has been married to Leigh Kennedy since 1988; they live in Hastings with their two children.
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Excerpts from the interview:
“I grew up reading science fiction, and within three months of discovering it, I knew I wanted to write science fiction. I did that for a couple of books and I got really bored. I was thinking all the wrong things, like 'How would Poul Anderson handle this scene?' It was such a blind alley, it was getting me nowhere. Then I had this three-year gap where I didn't write at all. It was a period of dissatisfaction: 'What the hell do I do? I want to be a writer, but I don't want to be that kind of writer.' At that point I started reading more broadly, non-fiction and literature -- not to write like that, but to go on writing what I wanted to write. I couldn't have written Inverted World as a science fiction novel if I'd thought of it as a science fiction novel. What I had to do is creep around the idea and take it by surprise. I've done that ever since.”
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“I strongly believe that reading isn't a passive activity. To somebody who doesn't like books, just sitting around and reading looks as if you're doing nothing, but actually you're active. Readers should be made to work a bit and they shouldn't take anything for granted. For me, the unreliable narrator keeps people alert. Some people get fed up with it and can't be bothered, but the people I think of as serious readers very much like it.”
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“At the time I sent The Separation in, all kinds of things happened. September 11th happened about three weeks after, and that kind of demoralized everybody. And Simon & Schuster UK was undergoing a huge reorganization. Everyone was either leaving or being fired or moved into another branch, and the only editor there seemed too young and inexperienced to understand the book. So his reaction had a critical effect on the way the book was published. They didn't do it in hardback because this editor didn't think it would sell, though people collect my books in hardback and all my previous books had sold many more than 5,000 copies in hardback. They didn't send it out to reviewers, and nobody could find the paperback in the stores.
“All my career I had heard other writers telling stupid-editor stories but I'd never had that problem. And then suddenly I had all the problems in the world! I was in this Robert Sheckley universe where I had the most idiotic publisher with my best book! Then one day Malcolm Edwards said, 'Have you ever thought of buying the book back and selling it to me?' It became Gollancz's bestselling book last year. So it worked out in the end, but I became really demoralized.”
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“The next thing on my horizon is the movie of The Prestige. It's under contract to New Market Films, who made Donny Darko, The Passion of the Christ, Monster, and Whale Rider. They bought the rights five or six years ago and at the time they said they wanted them for a new young director, Christopher Nolan. Since then he's gone on to make Memento, Insomnia, and Batman Begins, and he's huge! The Prestige is his next movie. How many fingers can you cross?”
