Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) (56 page)
Read Lavondyss (Mythago Cycle) Online
Authors: Robert Holdstock
Robert Holdstock (1948 – 2009)
Robert Paul Holdstock was born in a remote corner of Kent, sharing his childhood years between the bleak Romney Marsh and the dense woodlands of the Kentish heartlands. He received an MSc in medical zoology and spent several years in the early 1970s in medical research before becoming a full-time writer in 1976. His first published story appeared in the
New Worlds
magazine in 1968 and for the early part of his career he wrote science fiction. However, it is with fantasy that he is most closely associated.
1984 saw the publication of
Mythago Wood
, winner of the BSFA and World Fantasy Awards for Best Novel, and widely regarded as one of the key texts of modern fantasy. It and the subsequent ‘mythago’ novels (including
Lavondyss
, which won the BSFA Award for Best Novel in 1988) cemented his reputation as the definitive portrayer of the wild wood. His interest in Celtic and Nordic mythology was a consistent theme throughout his fantasy and is most prominently reflected in the acclaimed Merlin Codex trilogy, consisting of
Celtika
,
The Iron Grail
and
The Broken Kings
, published between 2001 and 2007.
Among many other works, Holdstock co-wrote
Tour of the Universe
with Malcolm Edwards, for which rights were sold for a space shuttle simulation ride at the CN Tower in Toronto, and
The Emerald Forest
, based on John Boorman’s film of the same name. His story, ‘The Ragthorn’, written with friend and fellow author Garry Kilworth, won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella and the BSFA Award for Short Fiction.
Robert Holdstock died in November 2009, just four months after the publication of
Avilion
, the long-awaited, and sadly final, return to Ryhope Wood.
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Robert Holdstock 1988
All rights reserved.
The right of Robert Holdstock to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2012 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11904 8
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real
persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
