Dan Simmons

Daniel Joseph Simmons was born in Peoria, Illinois, on 4 April 1948, to Robert A. Simmons and Kathryn H. (Catton) Simmons. His father managed an automobile electric firm and the family moved with his work. Dan grew up in small towns in Illinois and Indiana, first Brimfield, Illinois, and later Pittsboro, Indiana. His family remembered a childhood of riding bikes with friends along cornfield-lined roads.

Brimfield became the template for Elm Haven, the small Illinois town where Summer of Night (1991) and A Winter Haunting (2002) are set. He read everything he could find as a boy, from comic books to classics and nonfiction, and loved space, science and history. He had two brothers, Ted (who died before him) and Wayne.

Simmons studied English at Wabash College, a small men's college in Crawfordsville, Indiana, graduating with a BA in 1970. In his senior year he won a national Phi Beta Kappa award for excellence in fiction, journalism and art. In 1971 he earned a master's degree in education from Washington University in St. Louis.

He stayed close to Wabash all his life. In 2000 he founded the Hockenberry Summer Internship, an eight-week fiction writing residency for a Wabash junior, named in memory of his classmate Duane Hockenberry. Wabash awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1995, and his family later said it was the honour that meant most to him.

Before he was a novelist, Simmons was an elementary school teacher for 18 years: two years in Missouri, two years in Buffalo, New York (one as a specially trained BOCES resource teacher and one teaching sixth grade), and 14 years in Colorado, mostly in Longmont. In his last four years he created, coordinated and taught APEX, a gifted and talented programme serving 19 elementary schools. He won awards from the Colorado Education Association and was a finalist for Colorado Teacher of the Year, and he worked as a national language-arts consultant using his own Writing Well curriculum.

Former students remembered his classroom for simulations of the Cuban Missile Crisis, lessons built around Carl Sagan's Cosmos, and Black history lectures they kept notes from for decades. Every day after lunch he told his class the next instalment of a single epic story that ran the whole school year while the children coloured illustrations he had drawn. That story grew into Hyperion.

In 1981, close to giving up, Simmons attended a writers' seminar led by Harlan Ellison, who told him he was a writer and secured him a place at the Milford workshop that same week. His story The River Styx Runs Upstream won a Twilight Zone Magazine competition and was published in 1982, and he signed with Ellison's agent, Richard Curtis.

Song of Kali (1985), a horror novel set in Calcutta, won the 1986 World Fantasy Award. He became a full-time writer in 1987. In 1989 came Carrion Comfort, Phases of Gravity and Hyperion, the last winning the 1990 Hugo Award. The Hyperion Cantos continued with The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Endymion (1996) and The Rise of Endymion (1997).

He followed with horror (Summer of Night, Children of the Night, Fires of Eden, A Winter Haunting), the Joe Kurtz crime novels (Hardcase, Hard Freeze, Hard as Nails), science fiction epics drawn from Homer (Ilium and Olympos), and historical fiction including The Crook Factory (1999), The Terror (2007), Drood (2009), Black Hills (2010), Flashback (2011), The Abominable (2013) and The Fifth Heart (2015). He also wrote the story collections Prayers to Broken Stones, Lovedeath and Worlds Enough and Time, and the novella Muse of Fire. In all he wrote more than thirty novels and collections, translated into at least 20 languages.

Simmons married Karen Logerquist, from Buffalo, New York, in 1974. Their daughter, Jane Kathryn, was born on 15 February 1982, the same day his first story was published. They had two grandchildren, Milo and Lucia Glenn.

The couple settled in Longmont, Colorado, the town where he had taught for 14 years. He also wrote at Windwalker, the family's mountain cabin at about 8,400 feet near Rocky Mountain National Park, where an eight-foot sculpture of the Shrike, made by a former student, Clee Richeson, stood guard. He loved 1950s monster movies and hosted backyard summer film nights with Karen for friends.

Simmons believed writing could be taught and pointed to his own sixth graders, who tested well above their age in writing. He was also blunt about craft: he told workshop organisers he would not simply be supportive, arguing that a writer who could be crushed by an honest critique was not ready for professional life. He did not believe in writing whole second drafts, preferring to work on each sentence until it sounded right.

He described any well-written story, however dark, as a celebration of life, but said no book could compare to a child or grandchild. His politics drew attention later in his career, particularly after his 2011 novel Flashback, which many readers read as a right-wing polemic.

Hyperion is widely regarded as one of the defining science fiction novels of its era. The Guardian called Simmons a versatile, prolific and genre-stretching writer. Stephen King wrote that his whole family had read Carrion Comfort. The Terror reached a new audience through the 2018 AMC series.

His books were published in 28 foreign countries and translated into at least 20 languages, and he won Japan's Seiun Award for translated fiction several times.

World Fantasy Award for Song of Kali (1986) and for the story This Year's Class Picture (1993). Bram Stoker Awards for Carrion Comfort (1989), Prayers to Broken Stones (1991), This Year's Class Picture (1992) and Dying in Bangkok (1993). Hugo Award for Best Novel for Hyperion (1990). British Science Fiction Association Award for The Fall of Hyperion (1991). British Fantasy Award (August Derleth Award) for Carrion Comfort (1990). Theodore Sturgeon Award (1993). Many Locus Awards, including for Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, The Rise of Endymion and Ilium. International Horror Guild Awards for A Winter Haunting and The Terror. Colorado Book Awards for The Crook Factory and A Winter Haunting. World Horror Convention Grand Master Award (2013). Honorary doctorate from Wabash College (1995).

The Terror was adapted by AMC as a ten-episode first season of The Terror in 2018, with Jared Harris as Captain Francis Crozier. Simmons said he and Karen watched preview DVDs at home and judged it pretty nicely done, though he still hoped to see a book of his on the big screen. Over the years Hyperion was optioned by Warner Bros. with director Scott Derrickson attached, Guillermo del Toro was linked to Drood, and Ilium, Carrion Comfort and Song of Kali were all optioned, but none reached cinemas in his lifetime.

Flashback (2011), set in a near-future United States where a drug lets people relive their best memories, was strongly criticised by readers who felt it echoed Tea Party positions and blamed Barack Obama's policies for its dystopia. Simmons pointed out that the original short story had cast Ronald Reagan in that role, which did not satisfy his critics. Some commentators also found right-wing arguments in Olympos and in posts on his website forum.

Dan Simmons died on 21 February 2026, aged 77, from a stroke. His wife Karen and daughter Jane were with him. His family obituary says he died in Longmont, Colorado, where he lived; The New York Times, citing his daughter Jane, reported that he died in a hospital in Lakewood, Colorado, and that the cause was a stroke (Wikipedia describes complications of a stroke). News of his death spread widely on 27 February 2026, prompting tributes from Stephen King, Locus magazine and many readers. His cremation was handled by Ahlberg Funeral Chapel in Longmont, his ashes were to be scattered at a later date, and his family asked for gifts in his memory to be made to Wabash College. He had reportedly nearly finished Omega Canyon, a spy thriller set in 1945.