Neil Gaiman

Background

There is little doubt that Neil Gaiman is an Englishman, yet he currently resides near Minneapolis in the U.S. As a youngster, he acquired his passion for literature and read the works of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, James Branch Cabell, Edgar Allan Poe, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Wolfe, and G. K. Chesterton, among others. While working as a journalist in England, Neil Gaiman began writing. His second book is a biography of Douglas Adams. His first book, a history of Duran Duran, took him three months to complete. As Gaiman explains, “I was very, very good at taking a voice that already existed and parodying or pastiching it.” “Violent Cases” was the first of Dave McKean’s numerous partnerships. A D.C. Comics miniseries, “Black Orchid,” was based on this early graphic book. The breakthrough series “Sandman” followed, winning nine Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards and three Harvey Awards in its 75-issue run. For the first time, “Sandman” won a literary award: the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story in 1991.

For younger readers, Gaiman has written: “M Is for Magic” (2007), “Interworld” (2007), “Crazy Hair” (2009), which was nominated for a Greenaway Award and was illustrated by Dave McKean, and “The Dangerous Alphabet” (2008) with Gris Grimly as the illustrator, “Blueberry Girl” (2009), and “Instructions to a Young Wizard of Oz” (2008). During the early 1990s, when Gaiman began working on “Coraline,” when gothic horror was out of favor. Coraline was originally deemed too scary for children. Yet, it went on to win the British Science Fiction Prize, was initially published for World Book Day in 2009, and has now received widespread critical acclaim. “The Wolves in the Walls” was produced into an opera by the Scottish National Theatre in 2006, while “Coraline” was converted into a musical by Stephin Merritt in 2009.

He was awarded the Newbery Medal in 2009 for “The Graveyard Book” (2008), a gruesome yet charming novel about an orphan raised by ghosts in a graveyard. “The Ocean at the End of the Lane,” a purportedly adult novel published in 2013, is a man’s recollections of his childhood experiences with otherworldly horrors and was voted the Specsavers Book of the Year by U.K. readers. With “The Sandman: Overture” (2013 to 2015), Gaiman returns to the Sandman mythos for the first time in a decade. In this story, the circumstances leading up to the first Sandman tale were investigated by Williams III. This anthology of short stories, titled “Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances” (2015), contains several references to and riffs on the work of various writers and artists. In 2017, Gaiman provided a fresh take on Norse mythology by writing “American Gods,” while Bryan Fuller and Michael Green’s lavish version premiered on Starz and was met with great praise. On Amazon in 2019, Gaiman reworked the novel “Good Omens” into a miniseries.