Author Guest of Honour
TANITH LEE was born in North London in 1947. Because her parents were professional dancers (ballroom, Latin American)
and had to live where the work was, she attended a number of truly terrible schools, and didn't learn to read—she
is also dyslectic—until she was almost eight-years-old. She finally mastered her reading only because her
father taught her. This opened the world of books to her, and by the age of nine she was writing.
After much better education at a grammar school, Tanith went on to work in a library. This was followed by various other jobs—shop assistant, waitress, clerk—plus a year at art college when she was in her mid-twenties. Her first professional sale was "Eustace", a ninety-word vignette that appeared in The Nineth Pan Book of Horror Stories (1968), edited by Herbert van Thal.
In 1971, Macmillan published The Dragon Hoard, a children's novel, followed by the picture book Animal Castle and Princess Hynchatti & Some Other Surprises, a short story collection (both 1972). After receiving numerous rejections from British publishers for her adult fantasy novel The Birthgrave, she wrote a letter of inquiry to DAW Books, the American publishing firm founded by legendary science fiction fan and editor Donald A. Wollheim.
DAW published The Birthgrave in 1975, beginning a relationship that lasted fourteen years and saw the publication of nearly thirty novels and collections. Following the publication of her second and third books from DAW, Don't Bite The Sun and The Storm Lord (both 1976), she quit her day job to become a full-time freelance writer. Since then her work has appeared all over the world in numerous editions and translations.
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Tanith Lee has written around ninety books and approaching 300 short stories. Some of her best-known titles include Drinking Sapphire Wine, Night's Master, Death's Master, The Silver Metal Lover, Red as Blood or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer, The Gorgon & Other Beastly Tales, The Dragon Hoard, Dark Dance, Faces Under Water, White as Snow, Metallic Love and the substantial Arkham House collection Dreams of Dark and Light: The Great Short Fiction of Tanith Lee.
She writes in many styles and across numerous genres, including horror, science fiction, fantasy, historical, detective, contemporary-psychological, children's and young adult. Her preoccupation, though, is always people.
Four of her radio plays have been broadcast by the BBC, and her stories are regularly read on Radio 7. She also scripted two episodes ("Sarcophagus" and "Sand") of the cult 1980s BBC-TV series Blakes 7, and her story "Nunc Dimittis" was adapted for the cable TV anthology series The Hunger in 1999, directed by Russell Mulcahy.
A Nebula Award and Guardian Children's Fiction Award nominee, Tanith has won the British Fantasy Society's August Derleth Award, two World Fantasy Awards, and two Spanish Gilgames Awards. She has been a Guest of Honour at a number of conventions, including Boskone XVIII in Boston in 1981, and the 1984 World Fantasy Convention in Ottawa.
In 1992 Tanith married the writer-artist-photographer John Kaiine, her companion since 1987. They live on the Sussex Weald, near the sea, in a house full of books and plants, with two black-and-white overlords called cats.
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External Links
Tanith Lee's Website
Daughter of the Night: An Annotated Tanith Lee Bibliography
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