Short answers, pulled from the story.
Roger Zelazny is best known for The Chronicles of Amber, a fantasy series that weaves together Norse, Japanese and Irish mythology with Arthurian legend and real history. He also won wide recognition for Lord of Light (1967) and for short fiction including "A Rose for Ecclesiastes."
Roger Zelazny won six Hugo Awards across his career. His novel Lord of Light won in 1968, and his earlier novel And Call Me Conrad (published as This Immortal) tied with Dune for the 1966 Hugo Award for novel.
Roger Zelazny died on the 16th of June 1995 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the age of 58. The cause was kidney failure secondary to colorectal cancer. He had lived in Santa Fe for twenty years at the time of his death.
Zelazny drew on a wide range of mythological traditions, including Egyptian, Greek, Hindu, Norse, Chinese, Irish, Japanese and Navajo mythology, as well as Arthurian legend, Kabbalah, and the Cthulhu Mythos. Lord of Light uses Hindu cosmology; Creatures of Light and Darkness uses Egyptian mythology; Eye of Cat draws on Navajo tradition.
Neil Gaiman named Zelazny as the author who influenced him most, an influence visible in Gaiman's style and subject matter. Andrzej Sapkowski called Zelazny his spiritual teacher and credited him with inspiring his first novel. Samuel R. Delany wrote that Zelazny's arrival in the field directly shaped his own novel Nova.
Roger Zelazny was born on the 13th of May 1937 in Euclid, Ohio. He earned a B.A. in English from Western Reserve University in 1959, then an M.A. from Columbia University in 1962, where he specialized in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.