Peter F. Hamilton was born in Rutland in 1960, and still lives near Rutland Water with his wife Kate, daughter Sophie and son Felix. He began writing short stories in 1987, selling to the small press, before his first professional sale to Fear magazine in 1988. His novella The Suspect Genome was published by Interzone in 2000, and won the BSFA award. He has also been published in the In Dreams and New Worlds anthologies, and Postscripts magazine. A collaborative story with Graham Joyce, Eat Reecebread, was nominated for the Triptree award.
After some success with short stories, Peter started writing his first novel in 1889, which was Mindstar Rising (published 1993), which featured his psychic detective character, Greg Mandel. Two more Mandel novels followed, A Quantum Murder and The Nano Flower. After The Nano Flower, Peter wanted a change of direction and wrote The Reality Dysfunction, the book for which he is probably still best known, a blend of space opera and horror. It was the start of the Night's Dawn trilogy, which includes The Neutronium Alchemist and The Naked God, along with A Second Chance At Eden, a short story collection set in the same universe, and finally The Confederation Handbook. In total, the three main books of the trilogy come to 1.2 million words, which was some kind of record at the time.
A stand alone novel, Fallen Dragon, was next, another book set in the far future, this time dealing with the dying days of interstellar travel. It was followed by Misspent Youth, a near-future character study, examining the impact on the family of the first person to undergo rejuvenation. This was Peter's least successful book, critically and commercially, though he stubbornly stands by it to this day, claiming that's exactly how men will behave if the treatment ever does become real.
Peter then started writing in the Commonwealth Universe, which is very loosely tied in with Misspent Youth. With this he firmly returned to the space opera genre. The duo Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained were first, a classic alien invasion story. This was followed by the Void Trilogy, set a thousand years after the first two books, consisting of The Dreaming Void, The Temporal Void, and finishing with The Evolutionary Void (due late summer 2010). The Void Trilogy featured a mix of storylines dealing with the far future and a fantasy-style planetary romance.
Next year, 2011, Peter will be publishing another collection of short stories, provisionally titled Manhattan In Reverse, consisting of the short fiction he's written over the last 8 years, and two new stories written for the collection. He is currently at work on a further stand-alone SF novel, called Great North Road, set in 2140, which could be described as a monster in the dark story.