Christopher Priest was born in Cheadle, Cheshire, in 1943 and trained as an accountant before he turned to writing. He came up through science fiction fandom in the mid-1960s, published his first story, "The Run", in 1966 and his first novel, Indoctrinaire, in 1970. He was also a pointed critic. In The Last Deadloss Visions he picked apart the long history of Harlan Ellison's never-published anthology. He died in 2024 on the Isle of Bute.
His books are usually shelved as science fiction, although the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction often calls his work slipstream, a label for fiction that slides between genre and mainstream. Priest himself rejected the idea that science fiction is unserious by nature, and his prose is controlled and exact rather than showy.
Inverted World won the British Science Fiction Association Award and was a Hugo finalist. The Separation won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. The Prestige (1995) follows two feuding nineteenth-century stage magicians and brings in the inventor Nikola Tesla. It won the World Fantasy Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Christopher Nolan filmed it in 2006. Priest kept publishing late in life, with The Adjacent in 2013, Expect Me Tomorrow in 2022 and Airside in 2023.
If you came here from The Invisible Man, you met Priest as a reader of Wells: he wrote the introduction to the 2005 Penguin Classics edition, edited by Patrick Parrinder with notes by Andy Sawyer. For his own fiction, start with The Prestige, which is the most direct way into his fascination with rivalry, secrecy and the unreliable account. Inverted World is the natural second book.
