<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Guy Gavriel Kay, author of acclaimed fantasy novels such as Tigana, A Song for Arbonne and The Lions of Al-Rassan, is famous for blending historical and geographical details of real-world cultures and reinventing them as vehicles for compelling, character-driven stories. Born in Weyburn, Saskatchewan in 1954, he was pursuing a philosophy degree at the University of Toronto when he met Christopher Tolkien, son of the famous J. R. R. Tolkien. When Christopher’s father died he became legal executor of the elder Tolkien’s estate, and asked Kay if he would be willing to travel to Oxford and assist him in editing the fragmentary and incomplete Silmarillion.

After working in Oxford from 1974 - 1975, Kay returned to Canada and pursued a law degree from the University of Toronto. Though he completed the program and was called to the Bar of Ontario in 1982, Kay never practiced law. Instead he signed on with friend Edward Greenspan (himself a criminal lawyer) to write and help produce a radio show dramatizing real Canadian legal cases. Kay wrote for the show until 1989; during this period he wrote his first novel, The Summer Tree, while traveling abroad in Greece. The Summer Tree, first of a trilogy of high fantasy novels comprising The Fionavar Tapestry, was intentionally written by Kay “to work squarely in the Tolkien tradition while trying to allow room for character development and plausibility that I tended to find missing in most post-JRRT high fantasy. In a way it was a challenge to the debasing of the genre".

After completing The Fionavar Tapestry, Kay wrote Tigana in 1990 while living in Tuscany, continuing his tradition of working on stories while visiting abroad. Tigana was a novel about memory, both in the personal and national sense, and the dangers of such memories when carried to extremes. Tigana drew heavily on the geography and culture that Kay encountered in the Tuscan countryside, just as his later novel, A Song for Arbonne was inspired by time spent in Provence. With the publication of The Lions of Al-Rassan in 1995 Kay blended real-world history with his experiences in Spain. Drawing from the events of the Reconquista in medieval Iberia, Kay tells a tragic story of clashing cultures and religions in a land torn between two warring kingdoms. Later novels continue this trend and are set in the same alternate world as the fictional Al-Rassan, including the "Sarantine Mosaic" duology and his most recent book, The Last Light of the Sun.