Orson Scott Card

(1951 - )

aka Dinah Kirkham, Scott Richards, Byron Walley

Orson Scott Card is the multi-award winning and bestselling author of a number of ground-breaking SFF novels. Ender's Game is his first Young Adult cross-over novel in the UK.

Nobody had ever won the Hugo and Nebula awards for a novel and its sequel, two years in a row, until Orson Scott Card received them for Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, in 1986 and 1987. But Orson Scott Card's experience is not limited to one genre or form of storytelling.

His contemporary novels Lost Boys, Treasure Box, and Homebody brought a powerful emphasis on character and moral dilemmas to the old-fashioned ghost story. And his newest contemporary novel, Enchantment (April 1999 from Del Rey), is a romantic fantasy that has Sleeping Beauty being awakened by an American graduate student in Ukraine in 1991. The characters pass back and forth between Sleeping Beauty's world of ninth-century Russia and today's America, with the famous anti-hero of Russian folklore, the witch Baba Yaga, following close behind. Card has broken new ground with each of his major works. "The Homecoming Saga" (the novels The Memory of Earth, The Call of Earth, The Ships of Earth, Earthfall, and Earthborn) was a retelling of ancient scripture as science fiction. Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus is the sine qua non of alternate history novels, in which time travellers return to keep Columbus from discovering America - or at least from returning to Europe after having discovered it. It will be followed by books that reinvision Noah's flood and the Garden of Eden - in historically, culturally, and scientifically plausible ways.

His works have been translated into many languages, including Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovakian, Spanish, and Swedish.

A dozen of Card's plays have been produced in regional theatre, including the musical Barefoot to Zion (written in collaboration with his composer brother, Arlen L. Card), which played to sold-out houses in Utah as part of the Mormon Church's celebration of the sesquicentennial of the entry of the pioneers into Salt Lake Valley. His historical novel, Saints, has been an underground hit for several years, and Card has written hundreds of audio plays and a dozen scripts for animated video plays for the family market. Meanwhile, Ender's Game is being developed for film by Robert Chartoff, co-producer of The Right Stuff, Raging Bull, and the Rocky series, with Card writing the screenplay.

Born in Richland, Washington, Card grew up in California, Arizona, and Utah. He lived in Brazil for two years as an unpaid missionary for the Mormon Church. He received degrees from Brigham Young University (1975) and the University of Utah (1981). He currently lives in Greensboro, North Carolina. He and his wife, Kristine, are the parents of five children: Geoffrey, Emily, Charles, Zina Margaret, and Erin Louisa (named for Chaucer, Bronte and Dickinson, Dickens, Mitchell, and Alcott, respectively).