Jeff Noon

Jeff Noon (born 1957 in Droylsden, Lancashire) is a British novelist, short story writer and playwright whose work combines wordplay with fantasy. His speculative fiction has ties to the writing of Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges, and he is regarded as one of the most prominent contemporary science fiction writers in the United Kingdom. Until his move to Brighton in 2000, he set most of his stories in some version of Manchester, his native city.

Noon is best known for the so-called Vurt series, four novels that share characters and settings. Vurt (1993), which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1994, describes a shared alternate reality accessed by sucking colour-coded feathers, in which the dreams and myths of humanity become objectively real. Its sequel, Pollen (1995), concerns the struggle between the real world and the vurtual one, with echoes of Greek mythology. Automated Alice (1996) is a "trequel" to Lewis Carroll's Alice books, sending Alice to a future Manchester inhabited by hybrids and bureaucratic serpents. Nymphomation (1997), published last, is chronologically the prequel and follows a domino-based lottery in Manchester.

Beyond the series, he published the short story collection Pixel Juice (1998), containing fifty stories, and Needle in the Groove (2000), about a bass player drawn into a hidden history of music. Cobralingus is part poetry collection and part guide to his method of text transformation. Falling out of Cars is a road novel set in a near-future England, and Channel SK1N (2012) follows a pop star undergoing a personal transformation. His work as a playwright and screenwriter complements a career centred mainly on prose fiction.