Dan Simmons (born 1948, died 2026) was an American writer of science fiction, horror and historical fiction, best known for the Hyperion Cantos and for the Arctic horror novel “The Terror”. His books often mix genres within a single story, and his first novel, “Song of Kali” (1985), won the World Fantasy Award.
Simmons was born in Peoria, Illinois, on 4 April 1948. He took a degree in English at Wabash College in 1970 and a master’s in education at Washington University in St. Louis the following year, then worked in elementary education until 1989. His writing career took off in 1982, when Harlan Ellison helped him into the Milford writing workshop. His story “The River Styx Runs Upstream” won first prize in a Twilight Zone Magazine competition.
“Hyperion” (1989) won the Hugo and Locus awards. Its structure was inspired by Boccaccio’s “Decameron” and Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”, and the four books of the Hyperion Cantos, which end with “The Rise of Endymion” (1997), take their titles from poems by John Keats. He returned to large-scale science fiction with “Ilium” (2003) and “Olympos” (2005), which draw on Homer and Shakespeare.
His horror fiction includes “Carrion Comfort” (1989), named after a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and “Summer of Night” (1991), in which a group of children in 1960s Elm Haven, Illinois, band together against a centuries-old evil. One of them returns as an adult in “A Winter Haunting” (2002). Simmons also wrote three crime thrillers about Joe Kurtz, published between 2001 and 2003.
Much of his later work is historical fiction. “The Terror” (2007) is a fictionalised account of Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition in search of the Northwest Passage, with the icebound crews stalked by a monster. AMC adapted it as a ten-episode television series in 2018. “Drood” (2009) is based on the last years of Charles Dickens’s life, and “The Abominable” (2013) follows a 1920s climb on Mount Everest. “The Fifth Heart” (2015) was the last novel published in his lifetime.
Simmons died in Colorado on 21 February 2026, aged 77, from complications of a stroke. A further novel, “Omega Canyon”, had been announced by his publisher Little, Brown but had not appeared at the time of his death.
