Kevin J. Anderson
Kevin J. Anderson was born March 27, 1962, and raised in small town Oregon, Wisconsin, south of Madison-an environment that was a cross between a Ray Bradbury short story and a Norman Rockwell painting.
He first knew he wanted to create fiction when he was five years old, before he even knew how to write: he had seen the film of War of the Worlds on TV and was so moved that he took a notepad the next day and drew pictures of scenes from the film, spread them out on the floor, and told the story out loud (perhaps this is what led him into writing comics nearly three decades later!)
At eight years old, Kevin wrote his first "novel" (three pages long on pink scrap paper) on the typewriter in his father's den-The Injection, a story about a mad scientist who invents a formula that can bring anything to life . . . and when his colleagues scoff, he proceeds to bring a bunch of wax museum monsters and dinosaur skeletons to life so they can go on the rampage.
At the age of ten, he had saved up enough money from mowing lawns and doing odd jobs that he could either buy his own bicycle or his own typewriter. Kevin chose the typewriter . . . and has been writing ever since.
He submitted his first short story to a magazine when he was a freshman in high school, and managed to collect 80 rejection slips for various manuscripts before he actually had a story accepted two years later (for a magazine that paid only in copies). When he was a senior, he sold his first story for actual money (a whopping $12.50), but he never slowed down. He sold his first novel, RESURRECTION, INC., by the time he turned 25.
In the last four years, 25 of Kevin J. Anderson's novels have appeared on national bestseller lists; he has over eleven million books in print worldwide. His works have been translated into German, Dutch, Japanese, Spanish, French, Romanian, Greek, Russian, Portugese, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, Hungarian, Chinese, Indonesian, Hebrew, Korean, Slovenian, Estonian, Turkish, Croatian, and Polish.
Anderson recently signed the largest science fiction contract in publishing history, to write a prequel trilogy to Frank Herbert's classic SF novel DUNE, coauthored with Herbert's son Brian. Bantam Books paid over seven figures per book in this trilogy. For a book signing during the promotional tour for his comedy/adventure novel AI! PEDRITO!, Anderson broke the Guinness World Record for "Largest Single-Author Signing," passing the previous records set by Gen. Colin Powell and Howard Stern.
His STAR WARS JEDI ACADEMY trilogy became the three top-selling science fiction novels of 1994. He has also completed numerous other projects for Lucasfilm, including the 14-volumes in the New York Times bestselling YOUNG JEDI KNIGHTS series (cowritten with his wife Rebecca Moesta). His three original STAR WARS anthologies are the bestselling SF anthologies of all time.