Occupation Novelist Role Writer Name Katherine Kurtz | Notable works Deryni novels Genre Fantasy | |
Born 18 October 1944 (age 79)
Coral Gables, Florida, United States ( 1944-10-18 ) Education University of California, Los Angeles, University of Miami Nominations Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, Locus Award for Best Novel, Mythopoeic Fantasy Award Books Deryni Rising, Camber of Culdi, Childe Morgan, Saint Camber, High Deryni Similar People Roger Zelazny, Robert Silverberg, David Gerrold, Ardath Mayhar, Richard A Lupoff | ||
Katherine Kurtz Author Interview
Katherine Irene Kurtz is an American fantasy writer, known for her sixteen historical fantasy novels in the Deryni series. She also wrote several occult alternate history novels in her Templar series, and urban fantasy novels in her Adept series.
Contents
Her 1970 debut novel, Deryni Rising, was influential for being one of the first fantasy novels written in a mode closer to historical fiction than to mythology or legend, as was common in the then-popular high fantasy works such as those by J. R. R. Tolkien. Writing in Strange Horizons, Kari Sperring calls Kurtz the "first writer of secondary-world historical fantasy", noting her close attention to the importance of faith in pre-modern Western societies and her portrayal of magic as a formal, ritual practice as opposed to the "picaresque and informal" way magic was depicted in other fantasy of the time.
Personal life
Kurtz was born October 18, 1944 in Coral Gables, Florida, where she also grew up. She graduated with a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Miami. She married Scott MacMillan in 1983 and had a son with him. Until 2007, they lived in Ireland, and since then again in the United States, in Virginia.