Peter Morwood (person)

Peter Morwood was born October 20, 1956 in Lisburn, a suburb of Belfast in Northern Ireland. He spent an unremarkable childhood there, attending local elementary and secondary schools, and progressing in due time to Queens University in Belfast.

During this period he began to write for his own entertainment, and as a welcome relief from the horrific civil service job in which he found himself shortly after (a) acquiring his bachelors' degree in English literature, and (b) discovering how little work there was for someone with such a degree in the early 1980's. Morwood was at one point called on the carpet by one of his superiors at work for "wasting his time trying to become a writer", and told to settle down and concentrate on being a good civil servant. This advice he ignored, with the result that he has now been published in seven or eight other languages.

In writing and submitting his first fantasy novel, Morwood did just about everything wrong that could be done wrong as regards the merely physical aspects of a submission. He typed entirely too long a book for that period (some 170,000 words) on both sides of the paper, single-spaced, and then comb-bound the original manuscript before sending it out. One thing he did seem to have gotten right, though, was the content of the work -- right enough, at least, for the first literary agent who saw it to ask Morwood to resubmit the work, drastically cut, and in a more normal format...say, typed on only one side of the paper.

The novel was purchased by Century Hutchinson and published in 1983 as The Horse Lord, beginning a group of books usually referred to by their fans as "the first Alban sequence", and detailing the life and troubled times of the moody and violent young clan lord Aldric Talvalin as he attempts to reclaim his lordship of his homeland, Alba. This book was followed a year later by The Demon Lord and two years later by The Dragon Lord, in each of which Aldric goes through much more angst and commits a fair amount of bloodshed, accompanied by his partner the swordswoman Kirin, a "wizard" named Gemmel (whose inclusion caused some fans to fall into the misconception that the writer David Gemmell, a friend and contemporary of Morwood's, was actually a pseudonym of his), and a most unusual dragon. The War Lord's Domain, published in 1989, is the last of the sequence to see print so far; another, theoretically final volume, its title so far undetermined, is projected. (Incidentally, these four books will be re-released in the US by DAW Books in the summer and fall of 2005, as two-volume omnibus editions.)

During this period Morwood's life suddenly took an unexpected turn when Anne McCaffrey introduced him to the fantasist and science fiction writer Diane Duane, then living in the Philadelphia area. Morwood and Duane corresponded for several months, met a couple of times more at science fiction conventions in the UK, and finally began to run up such phenomenal transatlantic phone bills that it became plain it would be cheaper for them to just get married. This they did in 1986, at the Boston-area science fiction convention Boskone, before which Morwood had gratefully left the UK civil service to go freelance full time.

After six months spent in residence in Los Angeles while his wife completed some television work, and another six months or so of wandering the English and Scottish countryside, investigating possible places to live, Morwood and his wife finally set up house in County Wicklow, in Ireland. During this period, Morwood began work on a series of fantasy novels based more or less loosely on Russian folktales. Published in 1990, the novel Prince Ivan begins the group, telling the story of the young tsar Ivan Khorlovskiy, heir to the throne of the city of Khorlov, and the complications that instantly ensue when he meets, on a battlefield full of the slain, the sorceress-tsarevna Marya Morevna, "the most beautiful princess in all the Russias". The sequence continues with Firebird, published in 1992, in which Ivan struggles to deal with the difficulties of a "two-kingdom household" in which one partner is a skilled sorcerer. Ivan and Marya Morevna run seriously afoul of that quintessential witch, Baba Yaga, and of the Teutonic Knights, but with the assistance of various magical animals, including the skin-changing Wolf-Matyushka and her son, they win through in the end. The sequence presently ends with The Golden Horde, published in 1993; this novel details the dealings of Ivan, Marya Morevna, and their two young children with the Great Khan and his armies. A fourth book in the group, The Blue Kremlin, is projected.

This period also saw Morwood begin work on a pair of "prequel" novels to the first Alban sequence, detailing the dynastic and personal struggles of Aldric Talvalin's ancestors, several centuries before his time, as they invade the country which will eventually become Alba. The Clan Lords: Widowmaker and The Clan Lords: Greylady were published by Random House UK in trade paperback, in 1993 and 1994 respectively.

Additionally, during this period Morwood began to assist his wife in doing some "licensed" novel work here and there. The peculiar circumstances surrounding Duane's story-editing of the animated series Dinosaucers for DiC resulted in Morwood co-writing the "Rihannsu" novel The Romulan Way with her on their honeymoon. He later wrote a solo Star Trek novel, Rules of Engagement, and again collaborated with Duane on a series of "packaged novels" involving a pair of interplanetary policemen in the 2200's. The "Space Cops" books include Mindblast, Kill Station, and High Moon.

Morwood also began to be involved in television writing at this point, co-writing (among others) episodes of Gargoyles ("The Hound of Ulster", "Ill Met By Moonlight", 1993) and Batman: The Animated Series ("Red Claw Rising", 1996) with his wife. His most recent film/TV work as of this revision of the writeup (April 2005) is a four-hour TV miniseries for Columbia Pictures, a retelling of the Nibelungenlied entitled "Die Nibelungen" in Germany and "Ring of the Nibelungs" in English. This feature won the DIVA award in Germany for best telefilm of 2004, and achieved its host network's (Sat.1] highest-ever rating for a dramatic presentation.

Other projects in progress at this time include the historical novel "Games", an examination of the ancient gladiatorial industry, and a feature film script based on the Channel Dash.