Samuel R. Delany

His grandfather, Henry Beard Delany (1858—1928), was born into slavery, but after emancipation became educated, a priest and the first black bishop of the Episcopal Church.

Civil rights pioneers Sadie and Bessie Delany were among his paternal aunts.

His father, Samuel Ray Delany Sr. (1906–1960), ran the Levy & Delany Funeral Home on 7th Avenue in Harlem, from 1938 until his death in 1960.

The family lived in the top two floors of a three-story private house between five- and six-story Harlem apartment buildings.

Delany was born into an accomplished and ambitious family of the African American upper class.

His mother, Margaret Carey (Boyd) Delany (1916–1995), was a clerk in the New York Public Library system.

(He drew from their lives as the basis for characters Elsie and Corry in "Atlantis: Model 1924", the opening novella in his semi-autobiographical collection Atlantis: Three Tales.) Other notable family members include his aunt, Harlem Renaissance poet Clarissa Scott Delany, and his uncle, judge Hubert Thomas Delany.

Samuel R. "Chip" Delany (, ; born April 1, 1942) is an American writer and literary critic.

His work includes fiction (especially science fiction), memoir, criticism, and essays on science fiction, literature, sexuality, and society.

Samuel Ray Delany, Jr. was born on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem.

Delany attended the private Dalton School and, from 1951 through 1956, spent summers at Camp Woodland in Phoenicia, New York.

He studied at the merit-based Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program.

Delany's first published short story, "Salt", appeared in Dynamo, Bronx Science's literary magazine, in 1960.

Delany's father died from lung cancer in October 1960.

The following year, in August 1961, Delany married poet/translator Marilyn Hacker, and the couple settled in New York's East Village neighborhood at 629 East 5th Street.

Hacker was working as an assistant editor at Ace Books, and her intervention helped Delany become a published science fiction author by the age of 20.

He had finished writing that first novel (The Jewels of Aptor, published in 1962) while 19, shortly after dropping out of the City College of New York after one semester.

His next work was the trilogy The Fall of the Towers, followed by The Ballad of Beta-2 and Babel-17; he described his writing in this period, and his marriage to Hacker, in his memoir The Motion of Light in Water.

His fiction includes Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection (winners of the Nebula Award for 1966 and 1967, respectively); Hogg, Nova, Dhalgren, the Return to Nevèrÿon series, and Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders.

His nonfiction includes Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, About Writing, and eight books of essays.

In 1966, while Hacker remained in New York, Delany took a five-month trip to France, England, Italy, Greece, and Turkey.

During this period, he wrote The Einstein Intersection.

He drew on these locales in several works, including Nova and the short stories "Aye, and Gomorrah" and "Dog in a Fisherman's Net".

These works received critical praise: Algis Budrys called Delany a genius and poet and listed him with J. G. Ballard, Brian W. Aldiss, and Roger Zelazny as "an earthshaking new kind" of writer, while Judith Merril labeled him "TNT (The New Thing)".

Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1966 and 1967, respectively.

"The Star-Pit", Delany's first professional short story, was published by Frederick Pohl in the February 1967 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, and he placed three more in other magazines that year.

In 1968, he published four more short stories (including "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones", winner of the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1970) and Nova.

On New Year's Eve in 1968, Delany joined her; they then moved to London.

In the summer of 1971 Delany returned to New York, where he lived at the Albert Hotel in Greenwich Village.

In 1972, Delany directed a short film entitled The Orchid (originally titled The Science Fiction Film in the Latter Twentieth Century), produced by Barbara Wise.

From January 1975 to May 2015, he was a professor of English, Comparative Literature, and/or Creative Writing at SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Albany, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Temple University.

This was published by Doubleday, marking Delany's departure from Ace; it was his last science fiction novel until Dhalgren in 1975.

Weeks after Delany's return, he and Hacker began to live separately.

Delany played and lived communally for five months on the Lower East Side with the Heavenly Breakfast, a folk-rock band whose other members were Susan Schweers, Steven Greenbaum (aka Wiseman), and Bert Lee (later a founding member of the Central Park Sheiks).

Delany wrote a memoir of his experiences with the band and communal life, which was eventually published as Heavenly Breakfast (1979).

After he and Hacker briefly came together again, she moved to San Francisco.

In 1997, he won the Kessler Award; further, in 2010, he won the third J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in Science Fiction from the academic Eaton Science Fiction Conference at UCR Libraries.

He has won four Nebula awards and two Hugo Awards, and he was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2002.

The Science Fiction Writers of America named him its 30th SFWA Grand Master in 2013, and in 2016, he was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.

Delany received the 2021 Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award.