Roger Zelazny was an American science fiction and fantasy novelist and poet, born on May 13, 1937, in Euclid, Ohio.

He attended Euclid High School before pursuing his education at Case Western Reserve University and later at Columbia University. His early formation as a writer drew on a range of literary traditions, and he worked in English throughout his career. His fiction engaged with horror literature, fantasy, and science fiction, often moving between those modes within a single work. Among his notable titles are Lord of Light, Eye of Cat, Doorways in the Sand, Unicorn Variations, A Night in the Lonesome October, and the short fiction collection The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, and Other Stories.

The recognition Zelazny accumulated over the course of his career was substantial. He won the Hugo Award six times and the Nebula Award three times. Two of his Hugo wins came for fiction that would define his early reputation: the serialized novel published as ...And Call Me Conrad in 1965, which appeared the following year in book form under the title This Immortal, and the novel Lord of Light in 1967. These works placed him among the more decorated writers working in speculative fiction during the latter half of the twentieth century. The Chronicles of Amber, a multi-volume series, became the work most closely associated with his name across the broader reading public.

Zelazny died on June 14, 1995, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the age of fifty-eight. His body of work spans horror literature, fantasy, and science fiction, and his prose also carried a dimension of poetry — he identified as a poet as well as a novelist and storyteller. That range across genre, from the mythologically dense Lord of Light to the Gothic atmosphere of A Night in the Lonesome October, marks the consistent characteristic of his output: a willingness to move across the borders of speculative fiction rather than settle within any single one of them.