Life
Watson graduated in English Literature from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1963; in 1965 he earned a research degree in English and French 19th-Century literature.
Watson lectured English in Tanzania (1965-7) and Tokyo (1967-70), and taught Future Studies at the Birmingham Polytechnic from 1970 to 1976. After 1976 he devoted himself to his career as a professional writer.
His first novel, The Embedding, winner of the Prix Apollo in 1975, is unusual for being based on ideas from generative grammar; the title refers to the process of center embedding. A prolific writer, he has also written the novels Miracle Visitors, God's World, The Jonah Kit and The Flies of Memory and many collections of short stories. Watson is credited as author of the screen story for the motion picture A.I.:Artificial Intelligence.
During 1980, Watson and Michael Bishop wrote the first transatlantic SF novel collaboration, Under Heaven's Bridge, using typewriters and postal services.
He has also written a series of novels relating to the Warhammer 40,000 line of games: Space Marine, and the Inquisition War trilogy of Inquisitor, Chaos Child and Harlequin (republished in 2002 by The Black Library, with Inquisitor retitled Draco). Other recent stories have been published in US magazine Weird Tales, the Canadian anthology Lust For Life, New Writings in the Fantastic, the Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica volume 7, and in a few more books. Some of these stories have been translated into non-English languages.
A collaboration with Italian surrealist writer Roberto Quaglia has recently produced a book, The Beloved of My Beloved, launched during April 2009 during Eastercon.
Read more about this topic: Ian Watson (author)
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