Neil Gaiman

A popular writer of fantasy and the dreamily macabre, Neil Gaiman created the landmark comic Sandman and wrote the novella Coraline. He began writing in the early 1980s, first as a journalist and book reviewer. He moved into comics with Alan Moore's Miracleman series in the mid-1980s and began working on graphic novels with artist Dave McKean. Gaiman and McKean's Sandman ran for 75 monthly episodes, an industry phenomenon in the early 1990s (it ran from 1989 to 1996), that cemented Gaiman's reputation for mature fantasy. He has since moved from being a popular underground author to a mainstream success through comics, short stories, novels, children's books, television and movies. Gaiman's novels include Good Omens (1990, co-written with Terry Pratchett) and American Gods (2001) and Anansi Boys (2005); his children's books include The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish (1997),Coraline (2003) and The Graveyard Book (2008); his fantasy mini-series Neverwhere was broadcast by the BBC in 1996; he wrote the English screenplay for the animated feature Princess Mononoke (1997), the story and screenplay for MirrorMask (2005) and the screenplay for Beowulf. Coraline won a both the Hugo and Nebula awards in 2003 and was made into an animated feature (2009) starring Dakota Fanning.