D.M. Cornish
D.M. Cornish
born January 01, 1971 in Adelaide, Australia
gender male
genre Science Fiction & Fantasy, Young Adult, Children's Books
About this author
D. M. Cornish (born 1972) is a fantasy author and illustrator from Adelaide, South Australia. His first book is Foundling, the first part of the Monster Blood Tattoo trilogy. The second book named Lamplighter was released in May 2008. The third in the series is yet to be named.
D.M. Cornish was born in time to see the first Star Wars movie. He was five. It made him realize that worlds beyond his own were possible, and he failed to eat his popcorn. Experiences with C.S. Lewis, and later J.R.R. Tolkien, completely convinced him that other worlds existed, and that writers had a key to these worlds. But words were not yet his earliest tools for storytelling. Drawings were.
He spent most of his childhood drawing, as well as most of his teenage and adult years as well. And by age eleven he had made his first book, called "Attack from Mars." It featured Jupitans and lots and lots of drawings of space battles.
He studied illustration at the University of South Australia, where he began to compile a series of notebooks, beginning with #1 in 1993. He had read Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels, The Iliad, and Paul Gallico's Love of Seven Dolls. Classical ideas as well as the great desire to continue what Mervyn Peake had begun but not finished led him to delineate his own world. Hermann Hesse, Kafka and other writers convinced him there were ways to be fantastical without conforming to the generally accepted notions of fantasy. Over the next ten years he filled 23 journals with his pictures, definitions, ideas and histories of his world, the Half-Continent.
It was not until 2003 that a chance encounter with a children's publisher gave him an opportunity to develop these ideas further. Learning of his journals, she bullied him into writing a story from his world. Cornish was sent away with the task of delivering 1,000 words the following week and each week thereafter. Abandoning all other paid work, he spent the next two years propped up with one small advance after the other as his publisher tried desperately to keep him from eating his furniture.
born January 01, 1971 in Adelaide, Australia
gender male
genre Science Fiction & Fantasy, Young Adult, Children's Books
About this author
D. M. Cornish (born 1972) is a fantasy author and illustrator from Adelaide, South Australia. His first book is Foundling, the first part of the Monster Blood Tattoo trilogy. The second book named Lamplighter was released in May 2008. The third in the series is yet to be named.
D.M. Cornish was born in time to see the first Star Wars movie. He was five. It made him realize that worlds beyond his own were possible, and he failed to eat his popcorn. Experiences with C.S. Lewis, and later J.R.R. Tolkien, completely convinced him that other worlds existed, and that writers had a key to these worlds. But words were not yet his earliest tools for storytelling. Drawings were.
He spent most of his childhood drawing, as well as most of his teenage and adult years as well. And by age eleven he had made his first book, called "Attack from Mars." It featured Jupitans and lots and lots of drawings of space battles.
He studied illustration at the University of South Australia, where he began to compile a series of notebooks, beginning with #1 in 1993. He had read Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels, The Iliad, and Paul Gallico's Love of Seven Dolls. Classical ideas as well as the great desire to continue what Mervyn Peake had begun but not finished led him to delineate his own world. Hermann Hesse, Kafka and other writers convinced him there were ways to be fantastical without conforming to the generally accepted notions of fantasy. Over the next ten years he filled 23 journals with his pictures, definitions, ideas and histories of his world, the Half-Continent.
It was not until 2003 that a chance encounter with a children's publisher gave him an opportunity to develop these ideas further. Learning of his journals, she bullied him into writing a story from his world. Cornish was sent away with the task of delivering 1,000 words the following week and each week thereafter. Abandoning all other paid work, he spent the next two years propped up with one small advance after the other as his publisher tried desperately to keep him from eating his furniture.
Lamplighter
Continuing the absorbing, inventive saga started in Foundling, Lamplighter follows Rossamund Bookchild, now one of the Emperor's lamplighters, who is sworn to protect travelers from the ferocious bogles that live in the wild. Small and meek, he does not fit in. Then a haughty young female monster hunter is forced upon the lamplighters for training. As Rossamund begins to make new friends in the dangerous world of the Half-Continent, he also seems to make more enemies, finding himself pushed toward a destiny that he could never have imagined. . .
Foundling
BEWARE! Bogles, Revers, Grinnlings and Nickers - all can kill a human quicker than thought!
The vast lands of the Half-Continent bear the scars of centuries of conflict between monsters and men. Only the hardiest souls now travel the inland ways: merchants, imperial messengers and - bravest of all - the monster hunters. To be a hunter takes great cunning and extraordinary skill, for the creatures are as deadly as they are varied.
Not that Rossamund Bookchild should worry. The orhpaned boy with the girl's name lives safe behind the walls of Madam Opera's Estimable Society for Foundlings. Safe, at least, until the day he is recruited into the service of the Empire by a strange man with peculiar blood-red eyes. This is his story.
The vast lands of the Half-Continent bear the scars of centuries of conflict between monsters and men. Only the hardiest souls now travel the inland ways: merchants, imperial messengers and - bravest of all - the monster hunters. To be a hunter takes great cunning and extraordinary skill, for the creatures are as deadly as they are varied.
Not that Rossamund Bookchild should worry. The orhpaned boy with the girl's name lives safe behind the walls of Madam Opera's Estimable Society for Foundlings. Safe, at least, until the day he is recruited into the service of the Empire by a strange man with peculiar blood-red eyes. This is his story.