ABOUT GABRIEL KING

Jane Johnson is Publishing Director of Voyager and Tolkien for HarperCollins UK. She has worked in the field for nearly 14 years--authors she has bought and helped to develop include Raymond Feist, Stan Robinson, Katharine Kerr, Barbara Hambly, Robin Hobb, Michael Marshall Smith, Jack Womack, Geoff Ryman, Colin Greenland, Robert Holdstock, Janny Wurts, Julian May, David Zindell, and Guy Gavriel Kay. She has also handled the entire Tolkien list, including the Alan Lee illustrated editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. She says:

I live in rural isolation in the beautiful English village of Coleshill, Buckinghamshire; opposite the village duckpond and next to the pub, in a tiny 19th century cottage (with roses round the door, oak beams, and a primitive, but efficient, drainage system!) with my partner, Jad, a forester, and my Norwegian Forest Cat, Thorfinna Dorcas Lizzara (Finn). She has many grand champions in her pedigree, but has no airs and graces, spending most of her time outdoors, hunting and climbing trees. When I'm not editing or tending to the garden, I'm often to be found scaling sea-cliffs around the British coast. Born in 1960 in Cornwall (the ancient country of The Wild Road), I moved to London in 1978 to attend university and took a First in English, then a Masters degree in Old Icelandic--inspired directly by my great love of Tolkien and his fascination with the old languages. After teaching drama at high school, working in a betting office, and at the deeply eccentric Foyles bookshop, I moved into publishing by mistake after bumping into my next door neighbor, who worked at George Allen & Unwin (Tolkien's publishers since 1937)--and before I knew it had landed a PA job for the company.

One of the first authors I worked with was M. John Harrison (see below): we fell for each other in a big way and lived together for nearly 10 years, before splitting amicably in 1995. That same year we started working on The Wild Road, and the collaboration has, amazingly, kept us on very good terms, despite the inevitable aethestic wrangles! We are currently hard at work on the follow-up to The Wild Road, The Golden Cat, which completes this story cycle.

M. John Harrison (Mike Harrison) was born in Warwickshire in 1945 under the sign of Leo. He moved to London during the 1960s, working on the controversial and groundbreaking sf magazine New Worlds with authors like Michael Moorcock, JG Ballard, and Brian Aldiss. He has been a full-time writer all his adult life. His novels include The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, The Centauri Device, In Viriconium (shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize), Climbers (winner of the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature) and The Course of the Heart (published in the US by Doubleday, Arbor House, and St Martins Press). His latest solo novel, Signs of Life--due out from St Martins Press shortly--is a genetics thriller combined with a powerful modern romance.

He has led a twenty-year love affair with cats, since rescuing a stray in 1970s Camden Town. He currently lives in North London with a gorgeous black-tipped Burmilla cat who has an embarrassing pedigree name: Wychwynd Kojak, but known by friends simply as Iggy (for Iggy Pop--he had so much energy as a kitten that he broke his foot, running full-tilt the length of a vast polished wooden floor the very first night we had him). We saw him in a pet shop in the East End after a regular trip to the Mile End Climbing Wall, and despite his price tag (high) we had to save him. He is, of course, Tag, the hero of The Wild Road. Knowing this has made him very vain. It is his photo you see on the front cover of the UK edition of the book.