Cirrus@Austlit

Sean Williams was born in Whyalla, a seaport town on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia, but largely raised in Adelaide, where he still lives (as of 2017).

Educated at Pulteney Grammar School in Adelaide, he won the South Australia Young Composers Award the year he graduated (1984). While his music has not been as prominent a part of his published work as his writing, he has continued to work in the field, including producing the script and limited score for The Soap Bubble: A Space Opera (table reading at Conflux, 2006) and the musical collage The Grand Silence (2016).

He studied for a Bachelor of Economics at the University of Adelaide, from which institution he later gained both a Master of Arts and a PhD in Creative Writing: he remains a visiting scholar at the university and an affiliate of its J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice.  

In 1991, Williams began his writing career with a series of short stories in amateur and small-press publications, leading to a sale to the magazine Aurealis. He published more than forty stories in the 1990s in Australian periodicals and anthologies

His first novel was The Unknown Soldier, written with Shane Dix, and published in 1995, later reimagined and re-written as The Prodigal Sun, book one of the Evergence trilogy (1999-2001). He later collaborated on other works with Dix, most notably the Force Heretic trilogy, a series set in the Star Wars universe.

His work has been translated into French, Japanese, Russian and Polish, and collected in Doorway to Eternity (MirrorDanse Books, 1994), A View Before Dying (Ticonderoga, 1998), the Ditmar award-winning New Adventures in Sci-Fi (Ticonderoga, 1999) and Magic Dirt : The Best of Sean Williams (Ticonderoga, 2008).

His work for children includes the Troubletwisters series with Garth Nix, as well as the  collaboration, Have Sword, Will Travel. His work for young-adult readers includes the Broken Land Trilogy, The Change trilogy, and the Twinmaker series (three novels and multiple short stories). He has also written a wide range of standalone works for children, young-adult, and adult readerships.

Among his awards are multiple Aurealis and Ditmar Awards, and nominations for the Philip K. Dick Award, the Seiun Award, and the William Atheling Jr. Award for criticism.