 Marion Eleanor Zimmer Bradley was born on a farm in Albany, New York, during the Great Depression. She began writing in 1949 and sold her first story to Vortex in 1952. She was married to Robert Alden Bradley from October 26, 1949 until their divorce on May 19, 1964.
Bradley was the editor of the long-running Sword and Sorceress anthology series, which encouraged submissions of fantasy stories featuring original and non-traditional heroines from young and upcoming authors.
Although she encouraged in particular young female authors, she was not averse to including males in her anthologies. Mercedes Lackey was just one of many authors who first appeared in the anthologies. She also maintained a large family of writers at her home in Berkeley.
Ms Bradley was editing the final Sword and Sorceress manuscript up until the week of her death.
She created the planet of Darkover as a setting for her own series, writing a large number of Darkover stories as a solo author and later collaborating with other authors to produce Darkover anthologies, where once again she encouraged story submissions from unpublished authors.
For a time, Bradley actively encouraged fan fiction within the Darkover universe, but this came to an end following a dispute with a fan over an unpublished Darkover novel of Bradley's that had similarities to some of the fan's stories. As a result, the novel remained unpublished, and Bradley demanded the cessation of all Darkover fan fiction.
The Darkover novels may be considered fantasy with science fiction overtones or science fiction with fantasy overtones, as Darkover was a lost earth colony where psi powers had developed to an unusual degree.
Marion's most famous single novel is probably The Mists of Avalon, a retelling of the Camelot legend from the point of view of Morgaine and Gwenhwyfar, which grew into the Avalon series of books.
Her first published novel-length work was Falcons of Narabedla, first published in the May 1957 issue of Other Worlds.
When she was a child, she enjoyed reading adventure fantasy authors such as Henry Kuttner, Edmond Hamilton, and Leigh Brackett, especially when they wrote about "the glint of strange suns on worlds that never were and never would be." Her first novel and much of her subsequent work show their influence strongly.
Marion Zimmer Bradley has also published work under the pseudonyms: Miriam Gardner, Morgan Ives and Lee Chapman.
In 2000 she was awarded the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement. [edit]
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