Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card (born 1951) is an American science fiction writer best known for Ender's Game (1985) and its sequel Speaker for the Dead (1986), which made him the first author to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel in consecutive years.

He was born on 24 August 1951 in Richland, Washington. He began as a playwright and magazine editor, turned freelance writer in 1978 and later taught English at Southern Virginia University. Ender's Game started life as a short story in the August 1977 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact; he expanded it into a novel published on 15 January 1985, which won the Nebula and then the 1986 Hugo. Speaker for the Dead followed in March 1986 and repeated the double. The sequence continued with Xenocide (1991) and Children of the Mind (1996), and the parallel Ender's Shadow (1999) opened the Shadow series.

His other work includes Songmaster (1980), Hart's Hope (1983), the Tales of Alvin Maker beginning with Seventh Son (1987), Lost Boys (1992), the Homecoming saga (1992 to 1995), Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (1996), Enchantment (1999) and Pathfinder (2010).

For collectors. The key book is the first edition of Ender's Game, published by Tor Books in January 1985 (ISBN 0-312-93208-1, 324 pages) with a jacket by John Harris. Speaker for the Dead was also a Tor hardback first, in March 1986. Card issued revised texts of both novels in 1991, so the 1985 and 1986 printings carry the original wording.