Piers Anthony

Piers Anthony Dillingham Jacob (born August 6, 1934 in Oxford, England) is an American writer in the science fiction and fantasy genres, publishing under the name Piers Anthony. He is most famous for his long-running series set in the fictional realm of Xanth. Many of his books have appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list. He is one of the most prolific science fiction/fantasy authors of all time. He has claimed that one of his greatest achievements has been to publish a book for every letter of the alphabet, from Anthonology to Zombie Lover.

Anthony's family emigrated to the United States from Britain when he was four. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in his twenties. After completing a two year stint in military service, he briefly taught public school before becoming a fulltime writer. Anthony currently lives with his wife on a tree farm which he owns in Florida. He is a vegetarian, an agnostic, a proud liberal, a workaholic, and dislikes travel (hence his rarity at conventions). He and his wife have two daughters and one grandchild.

Anthony was blacklisted at one time, and thus feels that it is his duty to help aspiring writers circumvent traditional publishing houses and their stranglehold on the industry. On multiple occasions he has moved from one publisher to another (taking a profitable hit series with him), when he felt the editors were unduly tampering with his work. He has even sued publishers for accounting malfeasance and won judgments in his favor.

He also maintains an Internet Publishers Survey, in the interest of helping aspiring writers. For this service, he won the 2003 "Friend of EPIC" award for service to the electronic publishing community. For his HiPiers website, he won the Special Recognition for Service to Writers award from Preditors and Editors, an author's guide to publishers and writing services.

Anthony invested as an angel investor in Xlibris at one point, and is now a co-owner along with Random House.

Many of his popular novels have been optioned for movies. His popular series, Xanth, has a video game, titled "Companions of Xanth" by Legend Entertainment. It is made for PCs and on CD-ROM, although it is DOS-based. There is also a board game called Xanth by Mayfair Games.

Piers Anthony's novels usually end with a chapter-long Author's Note, in which he talks about himself, his life, and his experiences as they related to the process of writing the novel. He often discusses correspondence with readers and any real-world issues that influenced the novel.