Andy Duncan's collection Beluthahatchie and Other Stories won the World Fantasy Award, as did his story "The Pottawatomie Giant." His stories have appeared in Asimov's, Realms of Fantasy, SciFiction, Weird Tales, Starlight 1, Starlight 3. In 1998, Duncan was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Since then, a number of his stories have been honored: "Beluthahatchie" was a Hugo finalist; "The Map to the Homes of the Stars" was reprinted in Best New Horror; "The Executioners' Guild" was a Nebula and International Horror Guild finalist; "Fortitude" was a Nebula finalist; "Lincoln in Frogmore" was a World Fantasy Award finalist; "The Pottawatomie Giant" was a Nebula finalist and was reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror; "The Chief Designer" was reprinted in The Year' s Best Science Fiction; and "Senator Bilbo" was reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy.

In a 2001 interview, Duncan told Locus: "I say this whenever I get a chance to talk on a panel to aspiring writers: The real salvation of the field is for everybody to write that really peculiar stuff that only they can write, that no one else is going to write if they aren't. That's the course I have set myself. It's not that I sit down at the computer and think, 'I've got to write another of those peculiar Andy Duncan stories again,' but as I'm looking at my various ideas, I do wonder, 'Which ones are other people least likely to think of?' . . . When you put some familiar thing in an unfamiliar environment, or put two thoughts that do not seem related right up against one another and see that they are related, things get very interesting."

A native of Batesburg, South Carolina, Duncan graduated from the University of South Carolina with a B.A. in journalism (news/editorial) and spent seven years at the News & Record in Greensboro, North Carolina, both writing and editing, in features and in news. He then spent seven years in graduate school, teaching undergraduate English all the while. He earned his M.A. in creative writing (fiction) from North Carolina State University, where his thesis director was Nebula Award winner John Kessel, and his M.F.A. in fiction writing from the University of Alabama. He attended the 1994 Clarion West workshop in Seattle and has attended the past three Sycamore Hill Writers' Conferences in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. He also regularly attends the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Today he is senior editor of Overdrive, a truckers' magazine, and lives in Northport, Alabama, with his wife, Sydney.
 

Visit his home page at http://www.angelfire.com/al/andyduncan