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Photo of Adam Lee Adam Lee
Adam Lee was born in Newark, New Jersey at the exact midpoint of the century: midnight 31st December 1951. Stricken with polio at four, he spent much of his childhood bedridden and chairbound and read voraciously to relieve the tedium of his endless therapy sessions.
THE SHADOW EATER by Adam Lee His favorite authors -- Tolkien, Eddison, Dunsany, and Machen -- inspired him to seek out the older fables, folk tales, epics, and myths that are the root-source of modern fantasy. This provided direction in his life for the next twenty years as he took degrees in literature at the University of Pennsylvania, the art of fiction at Columbia University, and linguistics at New York University.

His academic fascination with words led him to a study of the origins of English, grappling with Sanskrit, and a life-changing confrontation with the sacred texts of the Aryan nomads -- the Vedas. Inspired by these spiritual writings, Adam Lee adopted first Zoroastrianism, then Buddhism. His religious interests became a passion and took him to China, Tibet, India, and Malaysia. Along the way he earned his living as an English instructor and spent two months in a fetid prison in Borneo in a case of mistaken identity. In Bali, he met and married an Islamic scholar and soon thereafter adopted Sufism. Together they traveled through Asia and the South Pacific visiting mosques and translating ecstatic poetry.

Their first child was born on the Coral Sea in the middle of a night storm and that harrowing experience convinced the Lees to give up their endless pilgrimage. After several stints in academic positions across the Pacific, the Lees settled down in a suburb of Honolulu, where they both teach in the religious studies department at the University of Hawaii. Adam Lee converted to Judaism while conceiving and writing the initial drafts of his first fantasy novel The Dark Shore. By the time that book was published and he was in the midst of writing The Shadow Eater, he felt moved by the writings of Isaiah to convert again, this time to Christianity.

Shortly thereafter, during the course of a routine physical exam, he was diagnosed with a rare and controversial brain disorder -- temporal lobe epilepsy. Unlike the dramatic muscular spasms and thrashing known as tonic-clonic seizure, the electrical storms in Adam Lee's brain cause no outward movements or changes. His seizures are subtle and contained within the limbic system, the core tissues that house the emotional circuitry of the brain. His epilepsy inspires philosophical interests, extreme religious feelings, and hypergraphia -- a tendency to write passionately. Currently, Adam Lee is working on Octoberland, his third novel in the Dominions of Irth series, and he is rereading the tractates of Friedrich Nietzsche. On Sundays, with his wife and two daughters, Adam Lee attends Quaker meeting, where he sits in silence -- and writes.

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