Eugene Byrne was born in Waterford City, in Ireland’s southeast corner, on the 25th of February 1959 but brought up in Burnham on-Sea in Somerset. He says, "I used to think I was weird and slightly exotic because in Somerset back in them days I was the local racial minority."
He also lived in Yeovil, Lancaster, and Morecambe, before settling in Bristol after seeing a mummy being dissected live on CCTV while passing the City Museum. He lives there still, with his wife Monique and their two children, and works as a freelance journalist and deputy editor of Venue, Bristol and Bath’s weekly what's on magazine.
His most recent book, Things Unborn, was published in April 2001 by Earthlight. It's a parallel universe fantasy about dead people coming back to life. It includes as a minor character an attendee from Octocon 1999, who won a place in the book in a raffle at the closing ceremony. He has also written the novel ThigMOO (Earthlight, 1999), as well as collaborated on the short story collection Back in the USSA (Mark Ziesing Books, USA, 1997), which he co-wrote with Kim Newman, with whom he shares a passion for alternative history stories, as can be seen at their website The Kim Newman & Eugene Byrne Alternate History Pages.
More recently he has found himself doing a lot of writing for comics, or rather graphic novels. He has collaborated with artist Simon Gurr on St. Vincent's Rock, a story set in Bristol in 2008, written to support Bristol’s bid to be the European City of Culture in that year. He is also working on a biography of Isambard Kingdom Brunel in comic form to coincide with Brunel’s 200th birthday in 2006, which will eventually be a hundred page graphic novel to be given to every secondary school pupil in the Bristol area and anyone else who wants a copy.
His website can be found here, and you can read a story of his online, the wonderfully titled Cyril the Cyberpig. You can also read one of his collaboration with Kim Newman online, the alternative history tale The Wandering Christian.
Eugene is a charming and genial guest, and an asset to any convention that is lucky enough to have him.
Profile by Anne M Kletcha