Kim Newman was born in London (in 1959), his parents forsook the city for the rural calm of the village of Aller, in Somerset. As fellow-author and friend, Eugene Byrne, says of Kim when he was young: "...if you remember the fashions of the 1970s, you'll recall that in winter, chaps wore anoraks, crombies or parkas. Kim wore an opera-cape." ("Introduction", Unforgivable Stories)

The relative quiet of his childhood stomping grounds, and his quick intelligence, decreed that Kim would need a direction for his talent. He developed an expertise on fantastic fiction and TV, be it Horror, Science Fiction, or Gothic, and memorised obscure details about Hammer Horror films, and Dr. Who. By the age of 15, he had written his first novel. After leaving school, Kim went to the University of Sussex where he studied English.

By 1980 he had moved to London, but commuted back to the West Country regularly to work in theatre and caberat circles. He was part of the Sheep Worrying Theatre Group, at the Arts Centre, Bridgwater. They produced many plays, musicals and assorted projects, and Kim even moonlighted as a kazoo-player in a cabaret band, Club Whoopee. He even did the odd stint as a thespian, and the photographic evidence can be seen on our left. While all these projects were enjoyable, they weren't very profitable, so throughout Kim was working determinedly to make his mark in literary circles.

He became successful as a film reviewer and critic, and soon his short stories were being picked up by magazines like Interzone. In 1985 his first published work hit the shelves. It was a non-fiction book, co-authored with Neil Gaiman, called Ghastly Beyond Belief: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of Quotations. It was quickly followed the same year by another non-fiction title - this time authored by himself - called Nightmare Movies: A Critical History of the Horror Film since 1968. During this period, Kim amassed impressive credentials as a reviewer and fiction writer, having written for almost every publication possible in the UK, and many more overseas.

His first published novel, was The Night Mayor in 1989. It was a story dealing with a film noir Virtual Reality, where two sleuths tried to track down a Master Criminal while dodging famous characters from movies. However, Kim also published work under the name of Jack Yeovil, and that year he released Drachenfels for Games Workshop. It spawned a successful series of books for the company, fast-paced potboilers that were written with great aplomb, and very quickly. In 1990, Bad Dreams came out, under his own name, and hinted at Kim's appreciation for the vampire character in literature and film. Anno DraculaThough, in 1992, with the publication of Anno Dracula, Kim was well and truly brought to the attention of the public. The book's premise is that Dracula did not die, but turned Queen Victoria and much of her royal court and the political elite into vampires, ushering in a society at the end of the 19th Century that is sharply divided between the warm and the Undead. One of the biggest appeals of the book is the conceit that Kim used by having characters from diverse novels, stories and films walking across the pages of the book, and interacting with his characters. The book was hugely popular, winning him The Children of the Night award for best novel, from The Dracula Society.

The Anno Dracula series has been followed by two books, the World-War II The Bloody Red Baron, and the 1960s Dracula Cha Cha Cha, as well as several short stories. There is even another one pending, called Johnny Alucard, which will collect his stories as well as containing new material. However, he has worked on innumerable projects also, including the choose-your-own-adventure, real-life The QuorumLife's Lottery, the dark The Quorum, and four collections of short stories - and that's not mentioning his non-fiction books, journalist credits, broadcasting work and critical texts. He's undoubtedly one of the UK's most prolific and talented writers, and has plenty of more surprises up his sleeve for us in the coming years.

If you read Kim's article about the genesis of the novel, Anno Dracula, you will get a good description of his childhood influences and an overview of his early career.