Photograph by Robert McFarlane. Taken in the clock tower of the old Sydney General Post Office in 2003.

The Current Short Biography, August 2007

Garth Nix was born in Melbourne, grew up in Canberra and lives in Sydney. He has worked as a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve, a bookseller, book sales representative, publicist, editor, marketing consultant and literary agent. More than 4.5 million copies of his books have been sold around the world and his work has been translated into 36 languages. Garth’s books include the award-winning fantasy novels Sabriel, Lirael and Abhorsen and the young adult science fiction novel Shade’s Children. His fantasy novels for children include The Ragwitch; the six books of The Seventh Tower sequence, and The Keys To The Kingdom series that begins with the Children’s Book Council of Australia Honour Book Mister Monday. Garth’s books have appeared on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, Publishers Weekly (US), The Bookseller(UK), The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sunday Times (UK). He lives in a Sydney beach suburb with his wife and two children.

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A Biographical Whimsy

I was born in 1963, in the Australian city of Melbourne. There were no really strange portents at my birth, apart from a brass band playing outside the window. Admittedly they were playing backwards and there were seven ravens circling above the band. But apart from that, nothing.

My father is a scientist, my mother an artist. Both of them are also writers, my father primarily in various scientific fields, my mother on papermaking, but they write more widely as well. From them I inherited a love of books and writing, plus I think an aesthetic and artistic sense coupled with a rational mind. Not to mention the tiny ivory figurine of a Confucius-like figure that has been handed down through the centuries, always to the second child. But that is another story . . .

The name Nix is Teutonic originally, that came with the Vikings to England. If you look it up in a good dictionary, you will see that one of its meanings is 'water sprite' or 'water spirit'. The Encyclopaedia Britannica says that a Nix can be recognised by their green hair and love of dancing and that they are sometimes spiteful and dangerous to humans. Even now I am required by law to carry a waterproof card that says, 'The bearer of this card may sometimes be spiteful and is always dangerous when dancing.'

My branch of the Nix family came from England to Australia around 1820 and we've been here ever since. Though I was born in Melbourne, my parents and my older brother and I moved to Canberra -- the national capital of Australia -- when I was little more than a year old. I don't recall being consulted about the move, but it was a good one. Canberra was and is a small city, and it was a good place to grow up. We were later joined by my younger brother, who was born in the hospital on the lake. When we went to see him, I remember seeing a hand clad in silken samite rising up out of the lake holding a sword. I wasn't sure what the hand was trying to do, and after six or seven dips in and out it eventually submerged completely. It was a nice sword and maybe I should have waded out to get it. But I was only three at the time.

I went all through school in Canberra, but as with many authors, much of my education came from books. I benefited from an excellent public library system and met many of my favourite authors for the first time in the children's library that I passed every day going to and from school. Well, I didn't exactly meet the authors, but I met their books. My apprenticeship as a wizard began then . . . I mean, my apprenticeship as an author began with reading. I am very grateful that the library was there, perfectly placed to pick up new books very afternoon.

I went to school at Turner Primary School till I was twelve, Lyneham High School from thirteen to sixteen, and Dickson College from seventeen to eighteen. They were good schools and I had some very good teachers. I was a smart and a smart-mouthed kid, but I got on pretty well with everyone, probably because my best friend was always the School Captain in every school and he was friends with everybody. I still have some great friends from my school years and I sometimes think that this was the best thing school ever did for me - provide some life-long friends.

When I was seventeen, I joined the Army Reserve to see if I might like to become an Army officer when I left school. The Australian Army Reserve is part-time, like the American National Guard. I spent two months in initial training and discovered that no way would I like to be in the Army full-time. But I liked being a part-time soldier and stayed in for the next five years. For most of that time, I spent one weekend a month and about six weeks a year in an Assault Pioneer platoon, learning how to build things like bridges and then blow them up. It was great fun, particularly in retrospect. I have forgotten such things as military stupidity, total exhaustion, spider bites and sunstroke.

After I left school, I worked for almost a year for the government in a truly boring job shuffling papers and coding computer forms. But because it was a government job they let me have lots of time off to go and do things with the Army Reserve, and I saved up enough money to go travelling in England and Europe, which I did for part of the next year.

While I was away, I wrote a few stories and most of a truly awful fantasy novel (the manuscript is triple-locked in a chest bound with chains in a deep cellar under a slab of concrete). But one of the stories, called 'Sam, Cars and the Cuckoo' became my first published short story in 1984.

With the success of a story accepted for publication under my belt, at the advanced age of 20 I decided I would be a professional writer. Fortunately, I had enough sense to realise that I'd better get some sort of university degree as a career precaution, rather than just trying to write stories. This was just as well, as I didn't sell another short story (though I wrote a lot) for about ten years.

I studied for a Bachelor of Arts in Professional Writing, majoring in fiction writing, scriptwriting and theatre. I graduated at the end of 1986 and immediately went to work in Dalton's, the biggest and best bookstore in Canberra (and totally unrelated to the American B. Dalton stores). It had a circular staircase that we assistants could slide down and spring out next to a customer to ask "Can I help you?"

I worked in the bookshop for six months, while continuing to work on my first novel, which I had begun as part of the requirements for my degree. It was called THE RAGWITCH, and after I left the bookshop and moved to Sydney in 1987, I continued to work on it. It was published in 1990 in Australia, and 1994 in the USA. I still remember coming home from a weekend away to hear a message from the publisher on my answering machine. I wish I'd kept that tape.

I stayed in the publishing industry in Sydney for the next six years, working in a number of different jobs at different companies. I fell in love with a biochemist who was studying law and we stayed together till 1994, when our lives took us in different directions and her to a different city.

In 1993, while we were still a couple, we travelled together from London to Pakistan, taking the overland route. From Turkey, we were basically retracing the westward footsteps of Alexander the Great, or the eastward footsteps of Silk traders. It was a great trip, through Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iran and Pakistan.

I wrote part of my next book SABRIEL on that journey. Since I write longhand in notebooks before I type it up, I was able to write sitting on the wall of a crusader castle in Syria, in Roman ruins in Turkey, and in the public gardens of Esfahan in Iran. I finished SABRIEL back in Sydney in 1994, writing in a tiny flat that was on top of a tall building that was itself on a tall hill, overlooking Sydney Harbour. The flat was small, sunlit and windswept, and the closest I have been to living in a wizard's tower, at least to date.

From 1994 to 1997 I left the publishing industry for a different day job, working as a PR and marketing consultant to technology companies. That was fun for a while, and certainly better paid than being a book editor, but ultimately I didn't like it. SHADE'S CHILDREN was written during this period, and perhaps reflects a darkness on my soul. People who work in advertising and marketing often have this stain, a fact which should be considered when evaluating a career in these fields.

I met the woman who was to become my wife towards the end of 1997, just as I was gearing up to leave the PR business and write full time. Her name is Anna, and we had actually met five years before, because in a strange stroke of fate, she had started work at the last publishing company I was at on the same day I left. We met again at a dinner for children's booksellers, librarians and teachers, where I was one of the guest speakers, as was Anna's father, who is also an author. It was billed as 'An Enchanted Evening' and the theme was love. Well, it sure worked for Anna and me. We went out together through 1998 and 1999 and got married in April 2000, in a lovely village called Bawley Point on the southern coast of New South Wales, one of Australia's states.

What else should I mention? Obviously there are tales too grim to tell here. Secrets that must be kept locked under the stairs. Strange diaries that are locked with clasps of silver and runes writ in gold.

But I can tell you that I didn't like being a full-time writer. I'd always written my books and worked at something else as well. So when I was offered the opportunity to be a part-time literary agent in 1999, I decided that would be ideal. A few days a week in the office, and the rest of the time writing at home. For the most part, that worked well. I found some great new authors (including Jaclyn Moriarty and Paul Hayden) and helped them get published, and also assisted some established writers (including Kate Forsyth, Simon Brown, Maxine McArthur) but at the end of 2001, I realised that I had too much writing to do and must once again be a full-time writer.

This decision was influenced by the difficulty I had in managing the enormous amount of writing I somehow got done while also being an agent, including finishing LIRAEL and ABHORSEN and the six book sequence for younger readers called THE SEVENTH TOWER. With two new novels and another seven-book sequence called THE KEYS TO THE KINGDOM planned for the next few years, I knew I had to give up something, and sadly I returned my agent's hat to the hatstand.

Now it is May 2002, and I live very happily with Anna in a lovely book-laden apartment just near Coogee Beach in Sydney. It's a place where kookaburras fly to the window to be fed bacon, rainbow lorikeets squawk at dawn, and we can swim seven months of the year -- but still be part of a city of four million people, with all the amenities (and some of the problems) that brings.

We're expecting our first child in July 2002, when everything will change again. I will keep a keen eye for any portents that may attend this birth, so in time to come our child can write a biographical piece secure in the knowledge that Dad really did see something amazing.

And that's the biography so far. Except for the parts I left out.

A late update in October 2005:

A lot has happened since May 2002. Now we have two children, both boys, and we live in a house not far away from that book-laden apartment, near a different beach. THE KEYS TO THE KINGDOM series is more than halfway through, with the fourth volume, SIR THURSDAY out in March 2006, but it has grown bigger and more complex than I imagined. Along the way I’ve managed to write various other things.

The books have kept on going, thanks to readers worldwide. ABHORSEN came out in 2003 and hit the New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists and Sabriel led a belated charge in the UK in mid-2002, with amazing results: I think all of my books that have been published by HarperCollins UK have made the Top 10 Nielsen Booktrack Children’s Bestseller lists. Somewhere in early 2005 the Old Kingdom/Abhorsen trilogy went over 1 million copies sold in the UK and US, add in Australia and the various translations (more than 25 languages right now) and the numbers are more than 1.5 million for the trilogy. Total sales for all my books in mid-2005 were about 3.5 million.

And another late update in August 2007:

The books keep on selling, about four and a half million copies to end-2006. I still find that hard to believe, and I’m grateful I was not discouraged when my first book, The Ragwitch, went out of print after selling about 3,000 copies, and I couldn’t sell the next one I wrote, which remains unpublished to this day.

Recreational Interests

Fishing, bodysurfing, collecting books of all kinds, reading, films, writing and lunch.

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