Specialties

Fiction, especially fantasy fiction, sf, literary fiction, crime fiction; cinema, especially animation (not anime), fantasy, sf, crime; illustrated books; children's books; popular science; reference; novelizations.

Profile

Paul Barnett came to the USA in 1999 from the UK where he was for nearly twenty years a freelance editor and writer, before that spending about a dozen years as a commissioning editor and/or editorial director for various publishers.

As a writer, mainly under the name John Grant, he has published over sixty books, of which about half are fiction, mostly fantasy but with some sf.

Among his nonfiction books are Encyclopedia of Walt Disney's Animated Characters, currently in its third edition and regarded as the standard work in the field; Masters of Animation; The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, with John Clute, for which he received the Hugo, World Fantasy, Locus, Eaton and Mythopoeic Society Scholarship awards; The Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Science Fiction Art Techniques, with Ron Tiner; and The Chesley Awards: A Retrospective, with Elizabth Humphrey and Pamela D. Scoville. He was Technical Editor (project manager/managing editor/text editor) of the Clute/Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, for which work he shared a rare British Science Fiction Association Special Award. He wrote the cinema section of David Pringle's Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and contributed essays to Pringle's St James Guide to Fantasy Writers. He has worked on books by Iain Banks, Terry Pratchett, Arthur C. Clarke, Diana Wynne Jones, David Langford, Steve Gallagher, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Steven Barnes, Ken McLeod, Robert Jordan, Kelly Freas and many others; among other major non-fiction jobs has been the Gangsters volume of Phil Hardy's Aurum Film Encyclopedia/Overlook Film Encyclopedia. His book reviews have appeared in scholarly journals such as Foundation and Extrapolation as well as in popular magazines like Samhain and SFX, and his short stories in various anthologies and magazines.

For a number of years he was Commissioning Editor of Paper Tiger, the world's best-known publisher of fantasy/sf art books. He is currently a Contributing Editor to AAPPL and US Reviews Editor of Infinity Plus. Covering most subjects (but not practical books, home improvement, etc.), he offers a full range of editorial and writing skills, from project management, book doctoring and "editorial packaging" through novelization, ghosting, rewriting, proposal development and manuscript evaluation to straightforward line editing.