Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jack Vance won Hugo Awards in 1963 for The Dragon Masters, in 1967 for The Last Castle, and in 2010 for his memoir This Is Me, Jack Vance!. He also won the Nebula Award in 1966 for The Last Castle, the Edgar Award in 1961 for The Man in the Cage, the Jupiter Award in 1975, and the World Fantasy Award in 1990 for Lyonesse: Madouc. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named him its fifteenth Grand Master in 1997.
The Gaean Reach is a fictional region of interstellar space colonized by humans, which Vance introduced into his science fiction by the 1960s. Old Earth, called Gaia, sits at the center; inner planets tend toward peaceful commerce while the outer edges, called the Beyond, are lawless and dangerous. Nearly all of Vance's science fiction from that period onward is set within this framework.
The Dying Earth, published in 1950, is set in a far distant future in which the sun is slowly going out and magic and technology coexist. Vance returned to the setting to write the picaresque adventures of Cugel the Clever and the magician Rhialto the Marvellous in books completed in 1963, 1978, and 1981.
Science fiction authors Frank Herbert and Poul Anderson were among Vance's closest friends. Herbert met Vance in the early 1950s while working as a reporter and interviewing him; the two later moved their families to Lake Chapala near Guadalajara to establish a writer's colony. In 1962, Vance, Herbert, and Anderson jointly built a houseboat and sailed it in the Sacramento Delta.
Although Vance was legally blind from the 1980s onward, he continued writing with the help of BigEd software created specifically for him by Kim Kokkonen. His final novel was Lurulu, after which he completed an autobiography published in July 2009 titled This Is Me, Jack Vance!.
The Vance Integral Edition is a limited hardback collection of all of Jack Vance's works, published in forty-four volumes between 1999 and 2006. Around three hundred volunteers collaborated over the internet to produce it, under the author's supervision. A forty-fifth volume contains the three novels Vance wrote under the Ellery Queen pseudonym in their original, unrevised texts.