Ken MacLeod was born in Stornoway on Scotland’s Isle of Lewis on 2 August 1954. He is married with two children, and lives in West Lothian. He has honours and masters degrees in biological subjects, and worked in the IT industry for several years. Since 1997 he has been a full-time writer, and in 2009, he was Writer in Residence at the Economic and Social Research Council’s Genomics Policy and Research Forum at the University of Edinburgh.

He is the author of 15 novels, from The Star Fraction (1995) to Descent (2014), and many articles and short stories. His novels have received two British Science Fiction Association Awards and three Prometheus Awards, and several have been shortlisted for the Clarke and Hugo Awards. He blogs at The Early Days of a Better Nation.

Ken is also the writer-in-residence on the MA Creative Writing course at Edinburgh Napier University.