Michael Scott Rohan

Michael Scott Rohan (born 1951 in Edinburgh) is a Scottish fantasy and science fiction author and writer on opera.

He had a number of short stories published before his first books, the science fiction novel Run to the Stars and the non-fiction First Byte. He then collaborated with Allan J. Scott on the nonfiction The Hammer and The Cross (an account of Christianity arriving in Viking lands, not to be confused with Harry Harrison's similarly themed novel trilogy of the same name) and the fantasy novels The Ice King and A Spell of Empire.

Rohan is best known for the Ice Age-set trilogy The Winter of the World. He also wrote the Spiral novels, in which our world is the Hub, or Core, of a spiral of mythic and legendary versions of familiar cities, countries and continents.

In the "Author's Note" to The Lord of Middle Air, Rohan asserts that he and Walter Scott have a common ancestor in Michael Scot, who is a character in the novel.

According to his entry on the website of the Little, Brown Book Group, "after many years in Oxford and Yorkshire (they moved to Leeds in 1984), he and his American wife Deborah (Archives Conservator for Cambridgeshire) now live (as of 1994) in a small village near Cambridge, next to the pub".

His father was of French origin, born on Mauritius but educated in France and later studied at Edinburgh University. During the Second World War he joined the British Army. His mother came from the Borders.

Rohan was born in 1951 in Edinburgh, in, apparently, the house next door to that of the famous author Robert Louis Stevenson. He was educated at the Edinburgh Academy and St Edmund Hall, Oxford University where, having initially gone up to read English, he studied Law. It was during his time as a student at Oxford that joined the Science Fiction group. Here he met the group's president, Allan Scott, who would later become his co-author on several books. He also met his future wife, Philadelphia native and Stanford post-graduate Deborah, through the group. The couple were to ultimately marry in 1977.

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