Curated playlist
Hugo Award–winning writers
- Stephen KingStephen King was walking on the shoulder of Maine State Route 5 on the 19th of June 1999 when a minivan struck him and sent him into a depression in the ground about fourteen feet from the pavement. The driver was distracted by a dog…
- George OrwellGeorge Orwell did not exist on any birth certificate. The man behind the name was Eric Arthur Blair, born on the 25th of June 1903 in Motihari, in the Bengal Presidency of British India. He chose his pen name late, in a letter to his agent…
- Woody AllenWoody Allen has made 50 feature films. That single fact sits at the center of a career so long and so productive it resists easy summary. Born Allan Stewart Konigsberg in the Bronx on the 30th of November 1935, he has written for film,…
- Orson WellesOrson Welles was born on the 6th of May 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and died on the 10th of October 1985. In between those dates, he directed what is consistently ranked as one of the greatest films ever made, terrified radio listeners…
- H. P. LovecraftH. P. Lovecraft died on the 15th of March 1937 in Providence, Rhode Island, virtually unknown to the reading public. He was 46 years old, hospitalized with terminal cancer of the small intestine, and had spent his final weeks keeping a…
- Stanley KubrickStanley Kubrick was born on the 26th of July 1928 in the Lying-In Hospital in Manhattan, and he died on the 7th of March 1999, just a few days after hosting a private screening of his final film for his family and its stars. Between those…
- George LucasGeorge Lucas was nearly killed before he ever made a film. On the 12th of June 1962, a few days before his high school graduation in Modesto, California, another driver broadsided his souped-up Autobianchi Bianchina, flipping the car…
- Christopher NolanChristopher Nolan does not own a smartphone, and he has no email address. He hand-delivers his scripts to the actors he wants, and his wife handles the rest of the outreach. This is a filmmaker whose movies have earned over $6 billion…
- Peter JacksonPeter Jackson was born on the 31st of October 1961 in Wellington, New Zealand, and grew up in the far northern suburb of Pukerua Bay. His parents were English immigrants: his mother Joan worked as a factory worker and housewife, and his…
- Vernor VingeVernor Steffen Vinge spent decades asking one question that made both scientists and storytellers uncomfortable: what happens when machines become smarter than the people who built them? Born on the 2nd of October 1944, Vinge was a…
- Neil GaimanNeil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman was born on the 10th of November 1960 in Portchester, Hampshire, into a family whose name had been changed from Chaiman to Gaiman by his grandfather after settling in Portsmouth. By the time Gaiman was seven…
- James CameronOn the 26th of March 2012, James Cameron sat alone inside the Deepsea Challenger and dropped to the deepest point on Earth. He reached the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, spending more than three hours on the ocean floor. No one had…
- Guillermo del ToroGuillermo del Toro was born on the 9th of October 1964 in Guadalajara, Jalisco, and grew up in a house his father once described as "an enchanted castle." When del Toro was about eight years old, he started making short films with a Super…
- Philippa BoyensPhilippa Boyens has three children, and every one of them has turned up on screen in a film she helped write. Boyens is a screenwriter from New Zealand who spent years working in theatre long before she ever touched a shooting script for…
- Philip K. DickPhilip K. Dick died on the 2nd of March 1982, in a Santa Ana hospital, having never seen the film that would make his name famous. Blade Runner opened four months later. His daughter had to bury his ashes next to the grave of his twin…
- Carl SaganCarl Sagan grew up in a modest Bensonhurst apartment with parents who, by his own account, "knew almost nothing about science." Yet it was precisely those parents who set him on a path that would eventually lead hundreds of millions of…
- Arthur C. ClarkeIn February 1945, a young radar officer named Arthur C. Clarke sent a letter to the editor of Wireless World. He suggested that stations placed in geostationary orbit could relay radio signals across the entire planet. He never patented…
- George R. R. MartinGeorge Raymond Richard Martin was born on the 20th of September, 1948, in Bayonne, New Jersey, the son of a longshoreman. Every day walking to school, he passed the dock and house that had once belonged to his family before the Great…
- L. Sprague de Camp"My own true name sounds more like a pseudonym than most pseudonyms do," L. Sprague de Camp said, explaining why he rarely used pen names. Over a career spanning 60 years, he wrote more than 100 books. By the 1930s and 1940s he had become…
- Isaac AsimovIsaac Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books, and on top of that he sent an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. He once said the only thing about himself severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment was his compulsion to…
- Timothy ZahnTimothy Zahn was born in 1951, and for much of the late 1980s, Star Wars was a franchise running on fumes. The films had wrapped, the toys were fading from shelves, and the next generation of fans had little reason to care. Then a novelist…
- Michael CrichtonMichael Crichton stood 6 feet 9 inches tall, and he spent much of his life feeling out of place because of it. That restlessness never left him. It pushed him through Harvard's English department and into biological anthropology, through…
- D. B. WeissD. B. Weiss was born on the 23rd of April, 1971, in Chicago, Illinois, and the career he eventually built would become one of the most celebrated and then most disputed in modern television history. His full name is Daniel Brett Weiss, and…
- David BenioffDavid Benioff was born David Friedman on the 25th of September, 1970, the youngest of three children in a Jewish family in New York City. By the time he was forty, he had helped build one of the most watched television series in history.…
- Joss WhedonJoss Whedon grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a household where Shakespeare was vacation reading and silence was a punishment for children who failed to be entertaining. Born on the 23rd of June 1964, he was Joseph Hill Whedon…
- Roger ZelaznyRoger Zelazny spent his evenings writing science fiction while working a day job at the U.S. Social Security Administration. For seven years, from 1962 to 1969, he clocked in at government offices in Cleveland and Baltimore, then came home…
- David BrinDavid Brin's grandfather was drafted into the Russian army and sent to fight in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. Brin was born on the 6th of October, 1950, in Glendale, California, to parents Selma and Herb Brin. Over the following…
- Jack VanceJack Vance published his first story in the summer of 1945 in Thrilling Wonder Stories. It ran sixteen pages. Over the next seven decades, he would go on to write more than sixty books, possibly close to ninety, across science fiction,…
- Fritz LeiberFritz Reuter Leiber Jr. was born on the 24th of December 1910, in Chicago, Illinois, into a household where Shakespeare was practically a family business. His father, Fritz Leiber Sr., was a celebrated Shakespearean actor, and his mother…
- Wernher von BraunWernher von Braun helped carry humanity to the Moon, yet more people died building his most famous weapon than were ever killed by it. Born on the 23rd of March 1912 in the small Prussian town of Wirsitz, he grew into a man whose…
- Lawrence KasdanLawrence Kasdan was late for a movie in 1963, and that lateness changed everything. His brother, Mark, took him to see David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, and when they arrived a few minutes late, Mark insisted they wait six hours for the…
- Leigh BrackettLeigh Brackett was born on the 7th of December 1915 in Los Angeles, California, and by the time she died in March 1978, she had left her mark on science fiction, crime fiction, Hollywood Westerns, and the Star Wars franchise. She earned…