Michael Moorcock is astonishing. His enormous output includes over sixty novels, innumerable short stories and a rock album; he has also written songs and performed with Hawkwind and Blue Öyster Cult. Born in London in 1939, he became editor of Tarzan Adventures at sixteen, moving on later to edit the Sexton Blake Library. He has earned his living as a writer/editor ever since. From 1964 to 1980 he was editor of New Worlds and continues to be advisory editor to present editions. Under his editorship an average science fiction monthly became the most important and experimental literary magazine of the 1960s. He is without doubt one of Britain's most popular and most prolific authors.

His many awards include the Guardian Fiction Prize (The Condition Of Muzak), the Nebula Award (Behold The Man) and the World Fantasy Award (Gloriana). Mother London was short-listed for the Whitbread Prize in 1988.

He has been compared with Tennyson, Tolkien, Raymond Chandler, Wyndham Lewis, Ronald Firbank, Mervyn Peake, Edgar Allen Poe, Colin Wilson, Anatole France, Edgar Rice Burroughs, William S Burroughs, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Joyce Cary, Ray Bradbury, H G Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Hieronymous Bosch, among others.