Ben Jeapes
About Author
Ben Jeapes believes that he was overexposed in early childhood to Dr Who, Thunderbirds and Star Trek and that this is what set him on the science fiction trail. The discovery that it came in written form was the icing on the cake for Ben and he started writing his own stories at the age of 18. He sold his first story in 1989 and has now had 18 of them published, mostly in the magazine Interzone. He has also had two novels published, His Majesty's Starship (December 1998, published in the US by Scholastic Inc. under what Ben considers the bafflingly inappropriate title The Ark) and Wingd Charriot (February 2000), both by Scholastic Press.
Ben's last novel The Xenocide Mission was a sequel to His Majesty's Starship and was published by David Fickling Books in May 2002. The fabulous The New World Order was published in hard back on 4th November 2004, with the paperback due in January 2006.
In what Ben terms his 'real life' he worked in academic publishing for 12 years until January 2000. He is now owner and proprietor of Big Engine (www.bigengine.co.uk), a science fiction publishing house dedicated to publishing out-of-print classics and new authors whose work gets the reaction of 'it's good but it's not quite what we want' from the corporate publishers. Ben is strongly in favour of the standards that apply in children's books strong writing, good plots and a minimum of waffle and wishes that more books could be written this way.
Ben's ambition is to live to be 101 and 7 months, so as to reach the 1000th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings and the arrival of the man responsible for Ben's unusual surname a mercenary called Jep, whose name features in the Domesday Book and who fought for William the Conqueror in the British Isles. It's not everyone who gets to celebrate a thousandth family anniversary, he says. Ben's other ambition is to have descendants of his own by the time he's 101, so that they can remind him what he's staying alive for!
Amongst Ben's likes are cats, good food, an occasional trip to the cinema and not being broke. Amongst his dislikes are junk e-mail, boy and girl bands, TV sport especially when it interrupts usual programming and he loathes stereotypes.
In Ben's own words he is English and as quietly proud of the fact as you would expect of the descendant of a Danish mercenary who fought for a bunch of Norsemen living in northern France.
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