Michael Shea was born in Los Angeles—in Culver City, across the street from the huge north wall of MGM Studio's main lot. There, the billboard-size movie ads greeted his infant eyes, and taught him awe and a love of grand narratives. An inveterate hitch hiker before, during, and after his college years, he encountered, in a flophouse up in Juneau, Alaska, a book of pure Fantasy entitled The Eyes of The Overworld. A year or so later, at a different flophouse in the Fillmore District (a ghetto in those days) of San Francisco, he encountered AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS.

His aesthetic goose was cooked, though he didn't come to know it till a couple years later, when he began writing Sword and Sorcery, and Mythos. He's won two WFA's, was a finalist for a third, was twice a finalist for Hugos, and twice for Nebulas. His work has been translated into French, German, Russian, Italian, Japanese, Swedish, Hungarian, Finnish, Greek and Urdu. (No—not Urdu—that's just a little joke.)