Michael Shea

1 universe Last reviewed 2026-08-26

Michael Shea was born July 3, 1946, in Los Angeles, California, to Irish parents, and spent his youth exploring the wildlife of Venice Beach and Baldwin Hills. He attended UCLA and UC Berkeley and undertook extensive travel in his youth, hitchhiking twice across the United States and Canada and spending a year traveling through France and Spain. Before becoming a full-time author, he worked a variety of jobs including house painting, teaching English as a second language, construction labor, and night clerking, eventually settling in the Bay Area around 1987. He married twice, his second marriage to artist and author Lynn Cesar in 1978, with whom he had two children, Adele and Jacob. Shea's debut novel, A Quest for Simbilis (1974), was an authorized sequel to Jack Vance's Dying Earth, and his most celebrated work, Nifft the Lean (1982), a collection of sword-and-sorcery adventures noted for its exotic, richly stylized prose influenced by Vance and Clark Ashton Smith, won the 1983 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Other notable works include The Color Out of Time (1984), Polyphemus (1987), and The Mines of Behemoth (1997). His novella "The Growlimb" won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella in 2005. Shea died unexpectedly on February 16, 2014.

Universe(s)

Books

• Nifft the Lean (1982) · Nifft the Lean Core Canon
• The Mines of Behemoth (1997) · Nifft the Lean Core Canon
• The A'rak (2000) · Nifft the Lean Core Canon

Aggregate across all universes

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 3 books
• Award recognitions across all universes: 0 (None recorded)

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