Chris Beckett

I was born in 1955 in Oxford. I’ve been writing stories of one kind or another since I was a child. My first published story was in 1990 in the British SF magazine Interzone. I have since published 30+ short stories in Interzone, the US magazine Asimov’s and various anthologies. My first novel, the Holy Machine was published by a small US publisher in 2004. (It’s since been republished in the UK, and has recently come out also in German). My second novel, Marcher, has so far only been published in the US.

My short story collection, The Turing Test, was published by a small publisher in Norwich in 2008. The publisher entered it for the Edge Hill Short fiction award (the UK’s only prize for single-author collections) and it won the prize in 2009, beating some distinguished competition (including a Booker Prize winner, Anne Enright, and Whitbread Prize winner, Ali Smith).

The Holy Machine was published in new edition by Corvus in 2010, followed by Dark Eden this year.

I trained as a social worker, and worked as a social worker and social work manager for 18 years. Since then, for the last 12 years, I have worked as a lecturer in social work (latterly part-time to give more time for my writing). I’ve written a number of textbooks used on social work courses, including one on Child Protection. I live with my wife Maggie in Cambridge and have three grown-up children, Poppy, Dom and Nancy.