Dave Duncan

Dave Duncan was a Scottish-Canadian author of fantasy and science fiction, born in Newport-on-Tay, Fife, in 1933 and based in Canada for most of his life; he died in Victoria, British Columbia, in 2018. He trained in geology at the University of St Andrews and spent nearly three decades as a petroleum geologist in Calgary before turning to fiction full-time, publishing his first novel, A Rose-Red City, in 1986 at age fifty-three. He went on to write more than fifty books built around inventive magic systems and richly detailed secondary worlds, including the Seventh Sword novels, the swordsman fantasies of Tales of the King's Blades and A Handful of Men, A Man of His Word, and The Years of Longdirk (the latter written as Ken Hood, one of his pen names). He won Canada's Aurora Award for West of January (1990) and Children of Chaos (2007), and was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2015.