Karen Traviss is a former defence correspondent and TV and newspaper journalist. She's now a political public relations manager and has also been a press officer for the police, an advertising copywriter, and a journalism lecturer. She has served in both the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service and the Territorial Army. A graduate of the Clarion science fiction and fantasy workshop, her work has appeared in Asimov's, Realms of Fantasy, and On Spec. She was born in Portsmouth, UK, and now lives in Devizes in Wiltshire.

Her earliest memory of an interest in science fiction was around the age of five, when she first saw the BBC serialisation of Fred Hoyle's A For Andromeda "I asked my mother what Andromeda was, and she said it was 'stars so far away that the light took millions of years to reach us'. I was so amazed by that concept that SF took me over."

She read Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, Blish and the short stories of Kit Reed. Her biggest influence has been the works of Harry Harrison, especially Bill The Galactic Hero, which she describes as "the only book I re-read regularly - it gets funnier, more tragic and more clever each time I examine it". Appearing on a Worldcon panel with Harrison fulfilled a childhood dream. Seeing the film 2001: A Space Odyssey as a child in 1970 was her major motivation in moving from reading SF to wanting to write it.

She writes mainly anthropological, political and military SF, but also ventures occasionally into urban fantasy in short fiction form.

Biography provided by the author, January 2004.

Photo: Tim Gander.