Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman

Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman, born Neil Richard Gaiman on 10 November 1960 in Portchester, Hampshire, is an English author whose work has crossed short fiction, novels, comic books, audio theatre, and screenplays. He came to wide notice in the late twentieth century and became closely associated with stories that move between myth, childhood fear, fantasy, and the ordinary world. His best-known works include the comic series The Sandman (1989–1996) and the novels Good Omens (1990), Stardust (1999), American Gods (2001), Coraline (2002), Anansi Boys (2005), The Graveyard Book (2008), and The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013).

Gaiman’s family background was Polish-Jewish and other Ashkenazi. His great-grandfather emigrated to England from Antwerp before 1914, and his grandfather settled in Portsmouth, established a chain of grocery stores, and changed the family name from Chaiman to Gaiman. Gaiman grew up with two younger sisters, Claire and Lizzy. In 1965 the family moved to East Grinstead in West Sussex, where his parents studied Dianetics at the Scientology centre. Gaiman has said he is not a Scientologist, describing Scientology, like Judaism, as his family’s religion.

Reading shaped him early. He was able to read at four and later said that school often felt easier because he would read the textbooks as soon as they were handed out. Around age ten he read Dennis Wheatley, with The Ka of Gifford Hillary and The Haunting of Toby Jugg making a special impact. J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Batman comics also mattered to him. He later remembered admiring Lewis’s parenthetical remarks to readers and wanting to write that way himself.

Gaiman was educated at several Church of England schools, including Fonthill School, Ardingly College, and Whitgift School. As a young man in the 1970s, he spent three years as an auditor for the Church of Scientology and also sang in a punk rock band, Ex Execs, formerly called Chaos. In adult life he lived at different times in East Grinstead, near Menomonie, Wisconsin, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was close friends with Terry Pratchett until Pratchett’s death in 2015; together, they were linked through Good Omens, first published in 1990.

His books and comics brought him major literary recognition. His awards include Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker awards, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie medals. He became the first author to win both the Newbery and the Carnegie for the same work, The Graveyard Book. The Ocean at the End of the Lane was voted Book of the Year in the British National Book Awards and was adapted into an acclaimed stage play at the Royal National Theatre in London. Gaiman also co-created the television adaptations of Good Omens and The Sandman.

Beginning in 2024, news outlets published sexual assault accusations against Gaiman by numerous women, and this affected or halted production on several adaptations of his work. One accuser sued Gaiman and his estranged wife Amanda Palmer for rape and human trafficking. Gaiman has denied the allegations. For readers who come to his words, the attraction has often been the mix of fairy tale, nightmare, wit, and direct address: the sense that a story can speak plainly while opening a door onto stranger things.