Author Profile: Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card

BIO

Nobody had ever won the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel two years in a row, until Orson Scott Card received them for ENDER'S GAME and its sequel, SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD, in 1986 and 1987. The third novel in the series, XENOCIDE, was published in 1991, and the fourth and seemingly final volume, CHILDREN OF THE MIND, was published in August 1996. ENDER'S SHADOW is not a sequel, instead, it returns to the events of ENDER'S GAME and views them from the point of view of another character, a street urchin named Bean. As with Rashomon or The Alexandria Quartet, Card discovers a new story in the midst of the old, when seeing it through other eyes.

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.

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.

Card has written two books on writing: Character and Viewpoint and How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, the latter of which won a Hugo award in 1991. He has taught writing courses at several universities, including most recently a novel-writing course at Pepperdine, and has also taught at such workshops as Antioch, Clarion, Clarion West, and the Cape Cod Writers Workshop.

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).