Michael Moorcock biography

Michael Moorcock was born in London in 1939. He began to write while still at school, starting a magazine, Outlaw's Own, in 1950. He continued to produce similar fanzines until 1962. After leaving school, he began to contribute professionally to Tarzan Adventures and edited that magazine from 1957 to 1958, writing for it his first heroic fantasy series. He contributed to the Sexton Blake Library and worked for a while as a blues singer before contributing science fiction and fantasy stories to SF Adventure and Science Fantasy. In 1964 he became a hugely influential editor of New Worlds, a position that he held, taking some breaks from it, until 1971 and the effective demise of the magazine. He has always been very prolific and, as the author of Elric, the Eternal Champion, Jerry Cornelius, Colonel Pyat, Karl Glogauer and Gloriana and Mother London, he is unquestionably one of the most important of all UK fantasy and SF writers. Michael Moorcock now lives in Texas.

"What I found lacking in Tolkien which I had found in, for instance, the Elder Edda, was a sense of tragedy, of reality, of mankind's impermanence. Tolkien really did set out to write a fairy tale and in my view that's exactly what he did-provide a perfect escape plan, which had the added attractions of having been written by an Oxford don. I knew and liked Tolkien who in a bufferish sort of way was very kind to me and encouraging. I looked forward to those books coming out. I was deeply disappointed by their lack of weight and their lack of ambitious language. They are about as likely to last as "the book of the century" as Ouida, Hall Caine or Marie Corelli, all of whom were judged the greatest writers of their day by a contemporary audience."

All Michael Moorcock Reviews