about Eric

Eric Nylund is the author of many novels, including the New York Times bestselling, HALO series, and the World Fantasy nominated Dry Water (1997).

Nylund was born near Los Angeles, and spent his childhood in the pine forests of Truckee, California. As a teenager he grew up in the Mojave Desert.

Nylund received his Bachelors degree in chemistry from the University of California at Santa Barbara and his Masters degree from the University of California at San Diego, and had advanced to candidacy for his PhD. He never dreamed he would write anything but scientific papers until one day he read a novel by a much cherished author (that was terrible).

He threw the book down and said the fateful words: “How hard could this be?”

So, over the next three months he sequestered himself in the UCSD library and read two hundred “how-to write” books. He then wrote 40,000 words of a novel that was just as bad as the one he threw down in disgust. He backed up, started over, and tried again.

The result was his first novel, Pawn’s Dream.

in 1994, Nylund went to the prestigious Clarion West Writers’ Workshop and decided to leave graduate school, abandon a stable career in science, and become a writer.

After publishing four more novels and becoming a successful mid-list author, he learned that the living-just-above-the-poverty-level-writer thing was not longer as romantic as it had seemed a few years before. He got a day job at Microsoft, first at their Encarta Encyclopedia division, and later at Microsoft’s still-young Game Studios.

In the beginning, most writers working on video games had to be content with producing game manuals and the instructions on how to install video card drivers, but this evolved into helping game developers write better scripts, making better games, and then creating huge story arcs to help build blocker-buster, billion-dollar game franchises.

As a writer for Microsoft Game Studios, Nylund helped develop such game franchises as HALO and GEARS OF WAR. He has also helped shape the intellectual property for some of the world’s best videogame developers including Bioware and Epic Games.

Later, Nylund moved to Amazon’s new game studios.

Nylund lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, Syne Mitchell, and their son.