Elizabeth Moon is an American writer of science fiction and fantasy, born in Texas in 1945, equally at home in the disciplined worlds of military SF and richly imagined epic fantasy.
A former US Marine Corps officer with degrees in history and biology, she brought a soldier's eye for logistics and command to her fiction. She made her name with The Deed of Paksenarrion, an epic fantasy trilogy opening with Sheepfarmer's Daughter that follows a sheepfarmer's daughter who runs away to become a mercenary and, in time, a paladin - admired for its unusually grounded, convincing soldiering.
She is equally known for the five-book space opera Vatta's War, from Trading in Danger to Victory Conditions, in which a disgraced young woman from a merchant-shipping dynasty must make her own way among pirates and interstellar politics. Her most personal book, The Speed of Dark, imagines a near-future autistic man offered a cure he is not sure he wants; inspired by her own son, it won the Nebula Award for Best Novel.
An accomplished fencer as well as a writer, she has published more than two dozen novels across five decades and lives near Austin, Texas.
