Charles De Lint
Charles De Lint is Canadian Fantasy author and has been instrumental in popularizing the genres of "urban fantasy" and "mythic fiction".
Charles was born in the Netherlands town of Bussum and emigrated to Canada at the tender age of four months. His father worked with a surveying company and as such, Charles' early years involved them traveling quite a bit around Canada and a three year period in Turkey and Lebanon.
After this his father traveled by himself so that the family could settle and build lasting friendships. During those early years of travel Charles developed a voracious and extensive appetite for reading. This was, to begin with mainly Folklore and Mythic matter until he discovered Tolkien.
There was no such genre as fantasy in the 1950's and 1960's and fantasy books were quite rare. Eventually Charles also discovered the delights of Sci-fi with authors like Roger Zelazny, Robert E Howard and Clark Ashton Smith.
Charles' other passion was music, he always wanted to pursue a career as a musician. He loved to play Celtic music but at the time there was little chance of gaining a career with that genre of music.
As such, for fourteen years after leaving school, Charles worked in music shops during the day and played gigs at the weekends. During this time he was always writing, but this was never was a view to publish but purely for his own enjoyment.
It was the mid-seventies when Charles began writing with any serious intent. He started to get together with an artist friend called John Charette and while John would draw, he would write stories to illustrate. Some of these stories were passed on to a writer called Charles R Saunders who convinced Charles to send some of them out to the growing fantasy magazines of the time.
When he managed to sell the first of these, he began to realise that people were interested, and would pay for the writing he so loved to do. For the following six-seven years he worked at the music shops, played music at weekends, and continued to write.
It was the novella "The Fane of the Grey Rose" that finally brought him to the attention of Andy Offutt who picked up the novel for his Swords Against Darkness series.
It was about this time that Charles finally decided to write full time, partly due to the music shop he worked at "downsizing" but mainly his wife and muse(MaryAnn) convincing him it was the right decision.
Coincidence or fate, he sold 3 novels that year and hasn't looked back since, his 1984 novel "Moonheart" is Tor's best selling trade paperback for their orb line of books. Charles De Lint has so far published 60 books, taught creative writing in the USA and Canada and has written original songs. His main instruments are vocals, guitar, whistles and the flute.
He currently lives in Ottawa with his wife and while writing is still his first love, these days he also dabbles in Art (his wife's forte) when he gets time, writes poetry and of course still plays music (also his wifes forte).