Biography
Morwood was born Robert Peter Smyth in Lisburn, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, and lived there for more than thirty years. From 1969 to 1975 he attended Friends School Lisburn, a Quaker-operated primary and middle school, and then Queen's University in Belfast, where he studied English literature and acquired an honors Bachelors degree with an emphasis on middle-English poets such as Chaucer. During this period Morwood also took pilot training as a cadet pilot with the Queen's University Student Air Squadron of the Royal Air Force; though budgetary considerations (on the Air Force's side) forced Morwood to make a choice between his degree studies and his further studies as a pilot. He chose to continue his work in English literature, and subsequently resigned his commission.
After graduation from university in 1979, Morwood took a position in the UK's Civil Service as a clerk working for the Customs and Excise. During this period he began work on his first novel, which he submitted and sold in 1982. He adopted the pen name "Peter Morwood" in honor of his mother, whose maiden name was Morwood. (He legally changed his surname to match the pen name in the mid-1980s.) His second and third novels were published in 1984 and 1986.
At a science fiction convention in Glasgow, Scotland in 1985, Morwood was introduced by author Anne McCaffrey to his future wife, the fantasist and science fiction writer Diane Duane. After several more meetings and a brief courtship, Morwood asked Duane to marry him, and they celebrated their engagement at the World Science Fiction Convention in Atlanta, Georgia. Morwood then returned to Northern Ireland to complete his term of employment in the Civil Service, and resigned his post in December 1986. Shortly thereafter he relocated to Los Angeles, California, where Duane was working for the animation studio DiC. They were married at the New England regional science fiction convention, Boskone, on February 15, 1987. Later in 1987, Morwood and Duane relocated briefly to Scotland, and then, after a short period spent roving the United Kingdom, to County Wicklow in Ireland, where the two of them currently reside.
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