A native of Roslyn, Pennsylvania, James Morrow spent his adolescence in the local cemetery. While such a preoccupation might bespeak an unbalanced mind, in Jim’s case the explanation lay in his passion for 8mm moviemaking. Before heading off to college, he and his friends employed their favorite graveyard in a series of genre films, including adaptations of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
Upon receiving an MAT from Harvard University, Morrow channeled his storytelling urge into satiric speculative fiction. The BBC praised his third such effort, This Is the Way the World Ends, as the best SF novel of 1986. Next came Only Begotten Daughter, winner of the World Fantasy Award. Throughout the 1990’s Morrow devoted his literary energies to killing the Supreme Being. The inaugural volume of the Godhead Trilogy, Towing Jehovah, received a World Fantasy Award. He followed it with Blameless in Abaddon, a New York Times Notable Book, and The Eternal Footman.
Having grown sick of his Creator, and vice-versa, the author next attempted to dramatize the coming of the Enlightenment. The Last Witchfinder was called “literary magic” by Washington Post critic Ron Charles. A follow-up phantasmagoria, The Philosopher’s Apprentice, struck NPR’s Maureen Corrigan as “an ingenious riff on Frankenstein.” Morrow’s most recent novel is Galápagos Regained, a faux-Victorian epic about the birth of Darwin’s theory.
In the short-fiction realm, Morrow’s efforts include the Nebula Award-winning “Bible Stories for Adults, No. 17: The Deluge” and such novellas as City of Truth, a Nebula winner, and Shambling Towards Hiroshima, which received the Sturgeon Memorial Award. At Readercon 33 he’ll be reading from his latest novella, Behold the Ape, in which Darwin’s enemies transplant his brain into a gorilla. A full-time writer, Jim lives in central Pennsylvania with his wife, Kathy, and three professional dogs.