Greg Egan was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1961 and earned a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from the University of Western Australia, before attending the National Film and Television School. He gave up a career in filmmaking—which inspired his surreal early novel An Unusual Angle—for science fiction, and has supported himself as a computer programmer when not writing full-time.

While Egan began publishing short fiction in the pages of Interzone and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in the ‘80s, his most impressive work is the extensive body of short fiction published during the ‘90s, which include “Reasons to be Cheerful,” “Learning to be Me,” “Cocoon,” “Luminous” and Hugo Award winning story “Oceanic”— and has established him as one of the world’s most important writers of science fiction. He is been a frequent contributor to Interzone and Asimov’s, has made sales to Pulphouse, Analog, Aurealis, Eidolon and New Legends, and has been represented in every volume of the US-based Year’s Best Science Fiction since 1991. Egan’s short fiction has been collected in Axiomatic, and Luminous.

Egan’s first major novel – the first of his “Nature of Consciousness” novels – was Quarantine, and it was followed by John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner Permutation City, Distress, Diaspora, Teranesia, and radical space opera Schild’s Ladder. After a lengthy break from writing he has recently completed a new novel, Incandescance.