Christopher McKenzie Priest

Christopher McKenzie Priest was born in Cheadle, Greater Manchester. Associated early with the British New Wave of science fiction and Michael Moorcock's New Worlds magazine, Priest broke through with his 1974 novel Inverted World, set on a city traveling on endless railway tracks across a hyperbolic, mathematically warped planet, which won the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Award.

Priest became celebrated for his cerebral, metafictional approach to narrative reality and the theme of the unreliable narrator, often returning to an enigmatic archipelago of islands in his Dream Archipelago series. In 1995, he published his crowning masterpiece, The Prestige, chronicling the obsessive, lethal rivalry between two Victorian stage illusionists. The novel won both the World Fantasy Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was adapted in 2006 by director Christopher Nolan into an acclaimed, Oscar-nominated feature film starring Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. Priest served as vice-president of the H. G. Wells Society.