Biography
Jamie Thomson was an assistant editor on White Dwarf (magazine) from 1981 to 1984 and wrote a regular column for Warlock (magazine). While working at Games Workshop, he was one of the developers of the computer game The Tower of Despair.
From 1984 to 1996 he was a prolific and best-selling author, usually publishing at least two titles per year. One of his most successful series was The Way of the Tiger, six linked adventures about a ninja hero, written with Mark Smith. The books have been published in Japan, France, USA, Italy and Sweden. Each title sold more than 60,000 copies in the UK alone. The software version from Gremlin Graphics went straight to number one.
After twelve years as an author, he moved full-time into videogame development at Eidos Interactive, publishers of Tomb Raider. In 1999 he raised over £1 million to set up his own game development company, Black Cactus, developers of the game Warrior Kings and its follow-up Warrior Kings: Battles.
After cancellation of a further sequel to Warrior Kings by the publishers, Black Cactus was wound up. Thomson raised a quarter of a million dollars in 2007 for a new start-up, Fabled Lands LLP, an intellectual property development company specializing in its own titles to be launched as iPhone comics or novels.
In addition to originating new titles for Fabled Lands LLP, Thomson has authored a novel, Corvus, for Boxer Books, was a writer on the creative team at Lionhead Studios working on Fable III for Microsoft, and has just written two novels for Fabled Lands LLP, Dark Lord: The Teenage Years, published by Orchard Books in 2011 and a sequel, Dark Lord: A Fiend in Need, published by Orchard in March 2012. The Dark Lord books are also available in Spain, Germany and the USA and have been optioned for TV. Turkish, Italian and Czech versions are expected in 2013.
Dark Lord the Teenage Years won the prestigious children's book award, the Roald Dahl Funny Prize 2012.
Read more about this topic: Jamie Thomson (author)
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)