<b>Michael Pryor</b> (born 1957) is an Australian writer of speculative fiction. Currently lives in Melbourne with his wife and two daughters.<br/>His first work to be published was the short story "Talent" in 1990, which was published in Aurealis No. 1. He received his first nomination for his work in 1993 when the short story "It's All in the Way You Look at It" was nominated for the Ditmar Award for best short fiction, however it lost to Greg Egan's "Closer". In 1996 Pryor released his first novel, The Mask of Caliban, which was a finalist for the 1997 Aurealis Award for best young-adult novel. In 2003 he started writing novels in The Quentaris Chronicles, a shared universe with several other authors. In 2015, Pryor switched gears to writing books for children. He first published Leo da Vinci Vs. The Ice-Cream Domination League in 2015, then three other books for children up to the present, with Gap Year in Ghost Town being nominated for the Aurealis Award for best fantasy novel in 2017. Pryor has been nominated for an Aurealis Award a total of nine occasions with the most recent being in 2018 for his short story "First Casualty".