Jack Dann

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Jack Dann.

Jack Dann (born February 15, 1945) is an American science fiction writer living in Australia.

Dann began publishing science fiction in 1970 with the stories "Dark, Dark the Dead Star" and "Traps," both of which appeared in the Ejler Jakobsson-edited Worlds of If and were collaborations with George Zebrowski. Since then, Dann has written or edited over seventy books, including the novels Junction, Starhiker, The Man Who Melted, The Memory Cathedral—which is an international bestseller,^{[citation needed]} the Civil War novel The Silent, and Bad Medicine, which is in the vein of the works of Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson. Dann’s work has been compared to Jorge Luis Borges, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, Carlos Castaneda, J. G. Ballard, Mark Twain, and Philip K. Dick.

His books have been translated into thirteen languages, and his short stories have appeared in Omni and Playboy and other major magazines and anthologies. He is the editor of the anthology Wandering Stars, one of the most acclaimed American anthologies of the 1970’s, and several other well-known anthologies such as More Wandering Stars. Dann also edits the multi-volume Magic Tales series with Gardner Dozois and is a consulting editor Tor Books.

He is a recipient of the Nebula Award, the Australian Aurealis Award (twice), the Ditmar Award (three times), the World Fantasy Award, the Peter McNamara Achievement Award, and the Premios Gilgamés de Narrativa Fantastica award. Dann has also been honoured by the Mark Twain Society (Esteemed Knight).

High Steel, a novel co-authored with Jack C. Haldeman II, was published in 1993 by Tor Books. Dann’s major historical novel about Leonardo da Vinci—entitled The Memory Cathedral—was first published by Bantam Books in December 1995 to positive reviews.,^{[citation needed]} It has been published in ten languages to date. It won the Australian Aurealis Award in 1997, was #1 on The Age bestseller list, and a story based on the novel was awarded the Nebula Award. The Memory Cathedral was also shortlisted for the Audio Book of the Year, which was part of the 1998 Braille & Talking Book Library Awards.

Dann is also the co-editor (with Janeen Webb) of the Australian anthology Dreaming Down-Under, which Peter Goldsworthy has called "the biggest, boldest, most controversial collection of original fiction ever published in Australia."^{[citation needed]} It has won Australia’s Ditmar Award and is the first Australian book ever to win the prestigious World Fantasy Award. His recent anthology Gathering the Bones, of which he is a co-editor, is included in Library Journal's Best Genre Fiction of 2003 and has been shortlisted for The World Fantasy Award.

Dann’s stories have been collected in Timetipping, Visitations, and the retrospective short story collection Jubilee: the Essential Jack Dann. Dann’s latest novel , The Rebel: an Imagined Life of James Dean is published by HarperCollins Flamingo in Australia and Morrow in the U.S. A companion volume, Promised Land, appeared from PS Publishing in 2007.

As part of its Bibliographies of Modern Authors Series, The Borgo Press has published an annotated bibliography & guide entitled The Work of Jack Dann. An updated second edition is in progress. Dann is also listed in Contemporary Authors and the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series; The International Authors and Writers Who’s Who; Personalities of America; Men of Achievement; Who’s Who in Writers, Editors, and Poets, United States and Canada; Dictionary of International Biography; the Directory of Distinguished Americans; Outstanding Writers of the 20th Century; and Who’s Who in the World.

Dann is also known for writing the book that gave the name to the game The Man Who Melted Jack Dann, a game where you place an author's name in front or behind the title of one of that author's books in order to see if you get a funny sentence.