Michael Williams

Michael Williams was born and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. Much of his childhood was spent in the south central part of the state, amid red dirt, tobacco farms, and murky legends of Confederate guerillas. He has spent a dozen years in various parts of the world -- Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Wisconsin, with stopovers in Ireland and England -- and emerged from the experience surprisingly unscathed. Upon returning to Kentucky, he has published a series of novels of increasing oddness -- combinations of what he characterizes as "gothic/historical fiction/fantasy/sf/redneck magical realism" -- beginning withWeasel's Luck (1988) and Galen Beknighted (1990), and most recently the critically acclaimed Arcady(1996) and Allamanda (1997). He lives in downtown Louisville, within sight of the fireworks over the river. His wife is pretty near perfect, and his sons are two fascinating specimens of teenaged wildlife. Locus magazine has described Arcady as "a quirky but fascinating novel." Williams believes, in the words of one of his grandfathers, that "a body could do a lot worse than that."