Matt Hughes (writer)

Matthew Hughes was born in Liverpool in May 1949. His family moved to Canada when he was five. As a teenager, he was a member of the Company of Young Canadians and worked a variety of jobs before becoming a journalist. He then moved into speechwriting, first on the staff of the Minister of Justice and the Minister of the Environment and subsequently as a freelance writer for corporate executives and politicians in British Columbia. While working as a speechwriter in 1982, he wrote a 27,000-word novella for a competition which he saw advertised in the Vancouver Sun. Although he did not win the contest, he returned to the story years later and expanded it into his first published novel, Fools Errant, which was released in 1994. Since 2007 he has worked across the world as a housesitter to support his fiction career. He has been married since the late 1960s and has three sons. One of his sons has high-functioning autism, which led Hughes to write the "To Hell and Back" books from the perspective of a high-functioning autistic character. ==Influences==

Hughes's Archonate stories and novels have been compared to the works of Jack Vance: Booklist called him Vance's "heir apparent" in their August 2005 review of The Gist Hunter and Other Stories. Hughes has written an authorised Dying Earth story ("Grolion of Almery") for the 2009 Vance tribute anthology Songs of the Dying Earth and in February 2020 was working on an authorised sequel to Vance's Demon Princes books, Hughes has praised Vance as being "a unique voice of genius." Other significant early influences include P. G. Wodehouse, Thorne Smith, L. Sprague de Camp (especially historical novels such as An Elephant for Aristotle), Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Philip K. Dick. and instead reads mostly crime fiction by authors such as Lawrence Block, Donald E. Westlake, Robert B. Parker and James Lee Burke, whom Hughes considers to be "the finest American crime novelist of them all." ==Awards and nominations==

Hughes's work has been shortlisted for numerous major science fiction awards, included the Nebula Award, Philip K. Dick Award, Locus Award, Aurora Award (English-language) and Endeavour Award. In 2000, his story "One More Kill" won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Short Story presented by the Crime Writers of Canada. In 2020 his contributions to science fiction and fantasy were recognised with the CSFFA Hall of Fame Trophy. and won the 2020 Endeavour Award. ==Bibliography==