Chris Beckett is a former social worker and now university lecturer who lives in Cambridge. He is the author of twelve stories for Interzone: three of them, "La Macchina" (issue 46), "The Welfare Man" (issue 74) and "Valour" (issue 141 ) were taken for anthologies. "La Macchina" appeared in Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best SF and in another US anthology, Gendanken Fictions. "The Welfare Man" appeared in The Best of Interzone; "Valour" and "The Marriage of Sky and Sea" were both taken for Year's Best Science Fiction 5 (Harper Eos); and "The Warrior Half-and-Half" features in the Big Engine Interzone collection The Ant-Men of Tibet and Other Stories.