George Turner (writer) country of citizenship Australia
George Reginald Turner (8 October 1916 – 8 June 1997) was an Australian writer and critic, best known for the science fiction novels written in the later part of his career. His first science fiction story and novel appeared in 1978, when he was in his early sixties. By this point, however, he had already achieved success as a mainstream novelist, including a Miles Franklin Award, and as a literary critic.Biography
Turner was born in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, and educated in Melbourne. He served in the Australian Imperial Forces during the Second World War. Subsequently, he worked in a variety of fields, including as an employment officer, as a technician in the textile industry, and was a reviewer of science fiction for the Melbourne Newspaper The Age. Prior to writing science fiction, he had a well-established reputation as a mainstream literary fiction writer, his most productive period being from 1959 to 1967, during which he published five novels. Two of these were award-winning, The Cupboard Under the Stairs (1962), being awarded the Miles Franklin Award, Australia's highest literary honour, and The Lame Dog Man (1967) being awarded a Commonwealth Literary Fund fellowship.During the 1970s, he gained considerable reputation for his reviews and criticism of science fiction, among his first critical publications in the field being in Australian Science Fiction Review, edited by John Bangsund, who at that time worked for Turner's publisher, Cassell Australia, and in SF fan magazine SF Commentary, edited by Bruce Gillespie. In 1977 he edited The View from the Edge, an anthology of tales produced by participants in a Melbourne writers' workshop, which he ran with science fiction authors Vonda McIntyre and Christopher Priest. Over a decade after his previous publication of a full-length work of fiction, he published Beloved Son (1978), his first science fiction novel. An extract from the novel had previously been published as "The Lindley Mentascripts" in Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature 1 in June 1977. Before his death, he published six more science fiction novels.
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