George Turner (writer) - Biography

Biography

Turner was born and educated in Melbourne. He served in the Australian Imperial Forces during the Second World War. Subsequently he worked in a variety of fields, including as an employment officer, as a technician in the textile industry, and was a reviewer of science fiction the Melbourne Newspaper The Age. Prior to writing science fiction, he had a well established reputation as mainstream literary fiction writer, his most productive period being from 1959 to 1967, during which he published five novels. Two of these were award winning, The Cupboard Under the Stairs (1962), being awarded the Miles Franklin Award, Australia's highest literary honour, and The Lame Dog Man (1967) being awarded the Commonwealth Literary Fund Award.

During the 1970s, he gained considerable reputation for his meticulous and well-considered reviews and criticism of science fiction, among his first critical publications in the field being in SF fan magazine SF Commentary, edited by Bruce Gillespie. In 1977 he edited The View from the Edge, an anthology of tales produced by participants in a Melbourne writers' workshop, which he ran with science fiction authors Vonda McIntyre and Christopher Priest. Over a decade after his previous publication of a full length work of fiction, he published 'Beloved Son' (1978), his first science fiction novel. An extract from the novel had previously been published as "The Lindley Mentascripts" in Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature 1 in June 1977. Before his death he published six more science fiction novels.