Guy Gavriel Kay

Guy Gavriel Kay (born November 7, 1954) is a Canadian writer of fantasy fiction.

The majority of his novels take place in fictional settings that resemble real places during real historical periods, such as Constantinople during the reign of Justinian I or Spain during the time of El Cid.

Kay has expressed a preference to avoid genre categorization of these works as historical fantasy.

, Kay has published 15 novels and a book of poetry.

, his fiction has been translated into at least 22 languages.

Kay is also a qualified lawyer in Canada.

Kay was born in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, in 1954.

Kay moved to Oxford in 1974 to assist Christopher in editing The Silmarillion.

He was raised and educated in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and received a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of Manitoba in 1975.

When Christopher Tolkien needed an assistant to edit his father J. R. R. Tolkien's unpublished work, he chose Kay, then a student of philosophy at the University of Manitoba, because of a family connection.

Kay returned to Canada in 1975 to pursue a law degree at the University of Toronto, which he obtained in 1978; he was called to the bar of Ontario in 1981.

Kay became principal writer and an associate producer for the CBC Radio series The Scales of Justice, and continued as principal writer when the series transferred to television as Scales of Justice.

Kay's first novel, the portal fantasy The Summer Tree that serves as the first volume of his Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, was published in 1984.

He subsequently had many other novels published, most of them in the field of historical fantasy.

Kay has voiced concerns relative to the decline of individual privacy, the expectation of privacy, and literary privacy.

The last principally has to do with the use of real individuals in works of fiction, such as Michael Cunningham's The Hours, partly based on the life of Virginia Woolf, where Woolf features in the novel as one of a number of protagonists.