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Christopher Priest

Biography

Christopher Priest is another of those Brit writers who are writing science fiction but, in doing so, produce more intelligent fiction than their peers writing nominally literary fiction. Granta recognised this fact by putting him on their Best British novelists list. His novels are intelligent – in some cases clearly too intelligent as he has obviously had to do some grunt work to make a living – and they have not had the reputation they deserve. He was born in 1943 in Cheadle, Cheshire. He took up writing after working for a firm of chartered accountants. He was married to science fiction writer Lisa Tuttle in the 1980s and is currently married to science fiction writer Leigh Kennedy. He died in 2024.

Other links

Christopher Priest (English novelist)
Christopher Priest’s favourite slipstream books
Christopher Priest: the Interaction (detailed review of this book on Priest)
Speech at 2005 World Science Fiction Convention
Interview
Interview

Bibliography

1970 Indoctrinaire
1972 Fugue for a Darkening Island (US: Darkening Island)
1974 Inverted World
1974 Real-Time World (stories)
1974 Your Book of Film-Making (for children)
1976 The Space Machine : A Scientific Romance
1977 A Dream of Wessex (US: The Perfect Lover)
1979 An Infinite Summer (stories)
1981 The Affirmation
1984 The Glamour
1985 Seven Deadly Sins (seven writers write about their sin of choice; Helen Lucy Burke, Ronald Frame, Wendy Perriam, Christopher Priest, Rose Tremain, William Trevor, Elizabeth Troop)
1990 The Quiet Woman
1993 Seize the Moment: The Autobiography of Britain’s First Astronaut (with Helen Sharman)
1994 Running Tall (with Sally Gunnell – autobiography of Sally Gunnell, British Olympic Champion)
1994 The Book on the Edge of Forever (aka The Last Deadloss Visions) (non-fiction)
1995 The Prestige
1998 Extremes
1999 eXistenZ (novelisation of film)
1999 The Dream Archipelago (stories)
2002 The Separation (novel)
2008 Ersatz Wines (anthology of earlier works)
2008 The Magic – The Story of a Film
2008″It” Came From Outer Space (occasional pieces)
2009 Real-Time World + 2 (expanded version of the 1974 book)
2011 The Islanders
2013 The Adjacent
2016 The Gradual
2018 An American Story
2019 Episodes (stories)
2020 The Evidence
2022 Expect Me Tomorrow
2023 Airside