About Stephen Hunt

About Stephen Hunt, fantasy and sci-fi author.

Born in the sixties in North America, Stephen Hunt is a genre writer currently residing in London (Great Britain).

Before embarking on a career in publishing - magazines, newspapers and books - Stephen went to University in the UK, getting a BA (Hons) in Marketing, followed by two years of study at the London Institute (Saint Martins, the London College of Printing, Camberwell College of Arts, Chelsea College of Art and Design and the London College of Fashion).

After running the online operations for various large newspaper and magazine publishers, Stephen found enough success from writing to become an author full-time.

Stephen's early pieces of short fiction - mainly 'cyberpunk' works - started to appear in the early 1990s in various genre magazines such as ProtoStellar, Expanse, Roleplayer Independent and Hologram Tales.

His first book, the fantasy novel 'For the Crown and the Dragon', won the WH Smith New Talent Award in 1994 and was published by the UK's largest bookseller under the auspices of their New Talent Initiative.

It went on to sell thousands of copies in paperback and got praise in reviews as diverse as Locus, the Guardian, Science Fiction Chronicle, Arcane, Broadsword and various other newspapers and genre titles.

The novel and its related short fiction sparked a sub-genre, flintlock fantasy, which crosses the tropes of Georgian and Napoleonic history with the conventions of the fantasy universe.

His novels are now published by HarperCollins in the UK alongside their two other fantasy best-sellers, JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. In the USA, Tor publishes Stephen's work. Check the links page for details of his various foreign language publishers.

The Court of the Air

Stephen is now on the management, technical and editorial boards for SFcrowsnest.com, the science fiction and fantasy web site which is currently ranked as the Internet's second most popular sci-fi site (the first is scifi.com - the web site of the SCIFI Channel).

The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

A fan-run site, SFcrowsnest - aka the 'Nest' - has to handle upwards of 800,000 readers a month (apparently this traffic can double when they run a scoop on popular TV series and films, and they've proud of having previously been thrown off the books of two ISPs for crashing their web host's entire network due to extreme traffic overages).

The Rise of the Iron Moon

Apart from visiting his relatives in New York and spending time with his family in the UK and Spain, Stephen enjoys painting, Spanish cooking, shooting, reading, collecting comics, comic art and pulp works, and generally nerding about on his PC and Mac.

Since late 2008, Stephen has also been acting as the Guest Literary Editor for the SciFi Channel in the UK (aka SyFy, at some point, probably). Those who have seen his scary face on TV know better than to tune in twice!