Дан Симънс/ Dan Simmons (1948-)

**c0lourblind-** Вто 07 Юли 2009, 10:11

Роден в Пеория, щата Илинойс. Започва да пише още в училище. В пети клас написва продължение на "Магьосникът от Оз". През 1971 г. завършва Вашингтонския университет, работи като учител в щатите Мисури, Колорадо, Ню-Йорк. През 1974 г. се премества в Колорадо, където в продължение на 13 години работи като учител в Лонгмънските училища. През 1981 г. взема участие в семинара за начинаещи писатели в Гленвънд Спрингс, където след разговора си с Харлан Елисън решава да изпрати разказ за конкурс, спонсориран от списание "The Twilight Zone Magazine". Разказът "The River Styx Runs Upstream" става лауреат на конкурса и първата професионална публикация на Симънс. През 1985 г. публикува дебютния си роман "Песента на Кали", който през следващата година получава Всенародната премия за фантастика. Широка популярност получава чрез романите от т.нар. "Хиперионски цикъл".

Лауреат на наградите British Science Fiction Award (1992), SF Chronicle Award (1991), Hugo Award (1990), Locus Poll Award (1990,]1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995), World Fantasy Award (1986, 1993), British Fantasy Award (1990), Bram Stoker Award (1990, 1992, 1993, 1994), Sturgeon Award (1993), Imaginaire Award (1996).

Publishing History

Dan Simmons' first published story, "The River Styx Runs Upstream," won the Rod Serling Memorial Award in 1982. His first novel, Song of Kali, won the 1986 World Fantasy Award. His first horror novel, Carrion Comfort, won the Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers of America. His first science fiction novel, Hyperion, won the Hugo Award. Since then his work has included contemporary literary fiction(Phases of Gravity, The Hollow Man, Entropy's Bed at Midnight), psychological suspense/horror (Summer of Night, Children of the Night, Fires of Eden, A Winter Haunting), three collections of shorter fiction (Prayers to Broken Stones ,Lovedeath, Worlds Enough & Time), two hardboiled noir novels in the ongoing "Joe Kurtz" series (Hardcase, Hard Freeze), several screenplays and completion of his four-volume science-fiction HYPERION CANTOS epic (Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion),about which The New York Times wrote --"An exemplary specimen of an all-too-rare subgenre: literate space opera, replete with believable characters facing hard moral choices" and of which The Denver Post said -- "Simmons' own genius transforms space opera into a new kind of poetry."
Simmons' 1999 literary-mystery-espionage novel The Crook Factory, about the spy ring run by Ernest Hemingway in Cuba in 1942, was awarded the 2000 Colorado Book Award for Best Novel and has been optioned for the screen . His 2000 novel Darwin's Blade -- a novel about accident investigation, insurance fraud, and the Russian mafia – was a critical success and is currently under consideration by ABC as a series. Another screenplay project currently underway is Dan's original treatment and script for European producer/director Andrei Ujica's "The End of Gravity" – a film about space travel and what it means to be human, scheduled to be shot, in part, aboard the International Space Station. The director has already shot one film in space – 1994's "Out of the Present," shot aboard space station Mir.
Locus magazine says, "Challenges appear to be what Dan Simmons is all about." Science Fiction Chronicle says, "Simmons doesn't just promise; he delivers."

Dan's novel SUMMER OF NIGHT sold well in the United States and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Readers in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere seem to have the same fascination with "Elm Haven, Illinois" circa 1960 as American readers do: a time of relative innocence for kids, long summer days, and an almost forgetten freedom when kids could jump on their bikes in the morning and return after dark without anyone worrying.
SUMMER OF NIGHT was more about the "secrets and silences of childhood" than it was about monsters. Here are a few snapshots from that summer of 1960 in the "real" Elm Haven - Brimfield, Illinois - with a kid brother and some true friends who may (or may not) bear a close resemblance to some of the characters in SUMMER OF NIGHT.

Biographic Sketch

Dan Simmons was born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1948, and grew up in various cities and small towns in the Midwest, including Brimfield, Illinois, which was the source of his fictional "Elm Haven" in 1991's SUMMER OF NIGHT and 2002's A WINTER HAUNTING. Dan received a B.A. in English from Wabash College in 1970, winning a national Phi Beta Kappa Award during his senior year for excellence in fiction, journalism and art.
Dan received his Masters in Education from Washington University in St. Louis in 1971. He then worked in elementary education for 18 years -- 2 years in Missouri, 2 years in Buffalo, New York -- one year as a specially trained BOCES "resource teacher" and another as a sixth-grade teacher -- and 14 years in Colorado. His last four years in teaching were spent creating, coordinating, and teaching in APEX, an extensive gifted/talented program serving 19 elementary schools and some 15,000 potential students. During his years of teaching, he won awards from the Colorado Education Association and was a finalist for the Colorado Teacher of the Year. He also worked as a national language-arts consultant, sharing his own "Writing Well" curriculum which he had created for his own classroom. Eleven and twelve-year-old students in Simmons' regular 6th-grade class averaged junior-year in high school writing ability according to annual standardized and holistic writing assessments. Whenever someone says "writing can't be taught," Dan begs to differ and has the track record to prove it. Since becoming a full-time writer, Dan likes to visit college writing classes, has taught in New Hampshire's Odyssey writing program for adults, and is considering hosting his own Windwalker Writers' Workshop in 2003.
Dan's first published story appeared on Feb. 15, 1982, the day his daughter, Jane Kathryn, was born. He's always attributed that coincidence to " helping in keeping things in perspective when it comes to the relative importance of writing and life."

Dan has been a full-time writer since 1987 and lives along the Front Range of Colorado -- in the same town where he taught for 14 years -- with his wife, Karen, his daughter, Jane, (when she's home from Hamilton College) and their Pembroke Welsh Corgi, Fergie. He does much of his writing at Windwalker -- their mountain property and cabin at 8,400 feet of altitude at the base of the Continental Divide, just south of Rocky Mountain National Park. An 8-ft.-tall sculpture of the Shrike -- a thorned and frightening character from the four Hyperion/Endymion novels -- was sculpted by an ex-student and friend, Clee Richeson, and the sculpture now stands guard near the isolated cabin.
Dan is one of the few novelists whose work spans the genres of fantasy, science fiction, horror, suspense, historical fiction, noir crime fiction, and mainstream literary fiction . His books are published in 27 foreign counties as well as the U.S. and Canada.

Many of Dan's books and stories have been optioned for film, and current discussions include plans for such books as The Crook Factory, Darwin's Blade, the four Hyperion novels, his story "The River Styx Runs Upstream," and his original screenplay for The End of Gravity. He also has written two teleplays which were produced for the low-budget syndicated TV series MONSTERS and a screenplay adaptation of Children of the Night in collaboration with European film director, Robert Sigl, with whom he hopes to adapt his 2002 novel, A Winter Haunting.
In 1995, Dan's alma mater, Wabash College, awarded him an honorary doctorate for his contributions in education and writing.

Fiction (Романи):
Song of Kali 1985
The Phases of Gravity 1989
Carrion Comfort 1989
Hyperion 1989
The Fall of Hyperion 1990
Entropy's Bed at Midnight 1990
Prayers to Broken Stones 1990
Summer of Night 1991
The Hollow Man 1992
Children of the Night 1992
Summer Sketches 1992
Fires of Eden 1995
Endymion 1996
The Rise of Endymion 1997
The Crook Factory 1999
Darwin's Blade 2000
Hardcase 2001
A Winter Haunting 2002
Worlds Enough and Time 2002
Hard Freeze 2002
Ilium 2003
Olympos 2004

Short Fiction (Разкази и новели): "The River Styx Runs Upstream" 1982 "Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams" "Carrion Comfort" 1983 "Remembering Siri" 1983 "Vexed To Nightmare By a Rocking Cradle" 1985 "E-Ticket to 'Namland" 1987 "Two Minutes Forty Five Seconds" 1988 "Metastasis" 1988 "Vanni Fucci Is Alive and Well and Living In Hell" 1988 "Iverson's Pits" 1988 "Shave and a Haircut, Two Bites" 1989 "Dying Is Easy, Comedy is Hard" 1990 "The Death of the Centaur" 1990 "The Counselor" 1991 "All Dracula's Children" 1991 "My Private Memoirs of the Hoffer Stigmata Pandemic" 1991 "This Year's Class Picture" 1992 "Elm Haven, IL" 1992 "One Small Step For Max" 1992 "Death in Bangkok" 1993 Playboy "Dying in Bangkok" 1993 "Sleeping with Teeth Women" 1993 "Flashback" 1993 "The Great Lover" 1993 "My Copsa Micas" 1994 "Looking For Kelly Dahl" 1995 "Orphans of the Helix" 1999 "On K2 with Kanakaredes" 2002. "The Ninth of Av" 2000

Non-Fiction (Документална/Научна литература): The Satyr 1960s Wabash College Press student newspaper "Read This" 1989 New York Review of Science Fiction "Determine Your Censorship Quotient" 1990 Gauntlet Magazine "Banished Dreams" 1990 Roadkill Press "Going After the Rubber Chicken: Three Guest of Honor Speeches" 1991 Roadkill Press "Childhood's End" 1991 "Summer Sketches" 1992 Lord John Press "This Man Will Scare You, And He Should" 1992 Roadkill Press "Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics of Poppy" 1993 Borderlands Press "Introduction to Cujo" 1994 Plume "Introduction to I Am Legend" 1995 Gauntlet Publications "Jack Vance: Dragon Master" in JACK VANCE: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography 2000 The British Library "Negative Spaces" 2000 Subterranean Press "Colorado Voices Columns in The Denver Post" 2001 The Denver Post