Jack Dann is a multiple-award-winning American-born author and editor, who has published more than seventy books and anthologies. His work (written largely in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism, and historical and alternative history) includes mutliple novels, notably Starhiker (1977), Junction (1981), The Man Who Melted (1984), The Memory Cathedral: A Secret History of Leonardo da Vinci (1995), the Civil War novel The Silent (1999), and Bad Medicine (2000). He is also the author of The Rebel: An Imagined Life of James Dean (2004). In addition to his novels, Dann has published numerous shorter works of fiction, essays, and poetry, including collected works, most recently Concentration (2016), a collection of short stories centring on the Holocaust. His books have been translated into more than thirteen languages. The vast majority of publications with which he has been associated, however, are anthologies (as editor or co-editor).
Dann's association with Australia began in 1994, when he moved from the USA to Melbourne to join Janeen Webb, a Melbourne-based science-fiction critic, academic, and writer, whom he met at a conference in San Francisco. The pair married the following year. They have since collaborated on several writing and editing projects, and are well known in the Australian speculative-fiction community. Their groundbreaking anthology Dreaming Down-Under, for example, not only won a Ditmar Award, but also became the first Australian book to win the World Fantasy Award. Dann won the award again with his later anthology Dreaming in the Dark.
Since moving to Australia, Dann has become an influential figure in the country's speculative-fiction field. He frequently attends conventions (as guest of honour, speaker, and/or panelist), and has played an active role in encouraging the development of the field, including running and contributing to seminars and workshops on writing. He was, for example, a tutor at the inaugural Clarion South writing workshop in 2004, to which he returned in 2009. Dann has also been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Nebula Award (1997), two Aurealis Awards (1996 and 1997), three Ditmar Awards (1997, 1999, and 2002), the World Fantasy Award (1999), and the Peter McNamara Convenor's Award (2008). He has also been honoured as an Esteemed Knight by the Mark Twain Society.
Although he lives on a farm in rural Victoria, Dann commutes back and forth to the USA (mostly Los Angeles and New York) on a fairly regular basis. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from The University of Queensland, with a dissertation including the creative work 'Shadows in the Stone' and a critical exegisis, 'A Study of Historical Divergence'.
In 2023, the sale was announced of a collection of genre-mixing specualtive fiction, Islands of Time, to Cemetery Dance.
