Biography
Kay was born in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, both in Canada. His background is Jewish.
When Christopher Tolkien needed an assistant to edit his father J. R. R. Tolkien's unpublished work, he chose Kay, then a student at the University of Manitoba, whose parents were friends of Baillie Tolkien's parents. Kay moved to Oxford in 1974 to assist Tolkien in the editing of The Silmarillion. There he learnt a lot about writing and editing, and later admitted of Tolkien's influence, "to be successful in fantasy, you have to take the measure of Tolkien — work with his strengths and away from his weaknesses".
He returned to Canada in 1976 to finish a law degree at the University of Toronto, and became interested in writing fiction.
Kay became Principal Writer and Associate Producer for a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio series, The Scales of Justice.
In 1984, Kay's first fantasy work, The Summer Tree, the first volume of the trilogy The Fionavar Tapestry, was published.
Most of Kay's subsequent works have a link to the realm of Fionavar, even if it is only a single reference to "... the first of all worlds...".
Kay is married to Laura Beth Cohen.
Read more about this topic: Guy Gavriel Kay
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