Tom Arden, who grew up in Australia, has worked as a university lecturer in Northern Ireland and now lives in England. His first novel was Moon Escape, written when he was seven, but it was with The Orokon series that he hit the public eye when it began appearing in 1997: a five-volume fantasy epic set in a Ruritanian world halfway between Jane Austen and Mervyn Peake. Now a full-time writer, he reviews regularly for Interzone and is a columnist for the sf, fantasy and horror website At the World's End.