Gene Wolfe awarded the 2012 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award

Science Fiction and Fantasy author Gene Wolfe (M) has been bestowed with the prestigious Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master designation by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, as part of the 2012 Nebula Awards.

Gene Wolfe is an American writer born in 1931. He published his first novel (Operation Ares) in 1970 and his most recent title is 2012's Home Fires. He is perhaps best known for The Book of the New Sun (M), a four volume epic story describes as "a masterpiece of science fantasy comparable in importance to the major works of Tolkien and Lewis" - Publishers Weekly.  

Wolfe's other best known work is Peace (M), first published in 1975 and reprinted many times since.

"Peace" is a spellbinding, brilliant tour de force of the imagination. The melancholy memoir of Alden Dennis Weer, an embittered old man living out his last days in a small midwestern town, the novel reveals a miraculous dimension as the narrative unfolds. For Weer's imagination has the power to obliterate time and reshape reality, transcending even death itself. Powerfully moving and uncompromisingly honest, Peace ranks alongside the finest literary works of our time" - Publisher

He has won many many writing awards, including multiple Locus and Nebula awards.

Here is what author Neil Gaiman has to say:

“It’s not that Gene Wolfe is, in the opinion of many (and I am one of the many), our finest living science fiction writer. It is that he is, in the opinion of the Washington Post (and of me, too) one of our finest living writers. He has been our uncrowned Grand Master for a long time, and now the rest of the world will know as well.”