Kim Newman

Kim James Newman (born 31 July 1959) is an English journalist, film critic, and fiction writer. Recurring interests visible in his work include film history and horror fiction—both of which he attributes to seeing Tod Browning's Dracula at the age of eleven—and alternate fictional versions of history. He has won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and the BSFA award.

Early life

Kim James Newman was born 31 July 1959 in London, the son of Bryan Michael Newman and Julia Christen Newman, both potters. He was raised in Aller, Somerset. He was educated at Dr. Morgan's Grammar School in Bridgwater, and set his experimental semi-autobiographical novel Life's Lottery (1999) in a fictional version of the town named Sedgwater. He studied English at the University of Sussex and set a short story, Angel Down, Sussex (1999) in the area.

Non-fiction

Early in his career, Newman was a journalist for the magazines City Limits and Knave.

Newman's first two books were both non-fiction; Ghastly Beyond Belief: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of Quotations (1985), co-written with his friend Neil Gaiman, is a light-hearted tribute to entertainingly bad prose in fantastic fiction, and Nightmare Movies: A critical history of the horror film, 1968–88 (1988) is a serious history of horror films. An expanded edition, an update of his overview of post-1968 genre cinema, was published in 2011.