Simon Brown

Simon Brown (born 1956) originally trained as a journalist and worked for a range of Australian Government Departments, including the Australian Electoral Commission and the NSW Railways Department. Brown wrote his first science fiction story in 1966, read his first science fiction novel in 1968, and by 1970 had decided he wanted to be a science fiction writer more than anything else in the world. He wrote science fiction short stories for many years and some of these have been collected in Cannibals in the Fine Light (1998). A second collection of Iliad-themed stories, Troy, was published in 2006. He won the 2009 short story division of the Aurealis Award for his story "The Empire", and his novels Privateer and Winter both received nominations for the Aurealis Best Science Fiction Novel Award. He's had six novels published in Russia. He is a member of the Australian Skeptics and edited Skeptical - A Handbook of Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. He was also an editor of Argos, the journal of the Canberra Skeptics. He worked as a journalist with the University of Western Sydney, and is now a full-time writer. He currently lives in Thailand with his wife Alison, who is an English teacher in Phuket, and his two school-age children Edlyn and Fynn.