Simon Brown (author)
Australian writer

Simon Brown (born 1956 in Sydney) is an Australian science fiction writer.
He originally trained as a journalist and worked for a range of Australian Government Departments, including the Australian Electoral Commission and the NSW Railways Department. He wrote science fiction short stories for many years and some of these have been collected in Cannibals in the Fine Light (1998). A second collection of Iliad-themed stories, Troy, was published in 2006. He is a member of the Australian Skeptics and edited Skeptical – A handbook of pseudoscience and the paranormal in 1989. He was also an editor of Argos, the journal of the Canberra Skeptics.
He won the 2009 short story division of the Aurealis Award for his story "The Empire"
Publications
Novels
Privateer, HarperCollins Australia 1996
Winter, HarperCollins Australia 1997
Inheritance: Book 1 of the Keys of Power, HarperCollins Australia, 2000
Fire and Sword: Book 2 of the Keys of Power, HarperCollins Australia, 2001
Sovereign: Book 3 of the Keys of Power, HarperCollins Australia, 2002
Empire's Daughter: Book 1 of the Chronicles of Kydan, Pan MacMillan Australia, 2004
Rival's Son: Book 2 of the Chronicles of Kydan, Pan MacMillan Australia, 2004
Daughter of Independence: Book 3 of the Chronicles of Kydan, Pan MacMillan Australia, 2005
Collections
Cannibals of the Fine Light, Ticonderoga Publications, April 1998
Troy, Ticonderoga Publications, 2006
Selected short fiction
"With Clouds at Our Feet" (1998) in Dreaming Down-Under (ed. Jack Dann, Janeen Webb)
"Water Babies (novelette)|Water Babies" (2004) in Agog! Smashing Stories (ed. Cat Sparks)
"Leviathan (short story)|Leviathan" (2006) in Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005 (ed.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Simon Brown (author)” is australian writer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Simon, Brown and author, not as a finished interpretation.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7518354. VIAF identifies the subject as 55933156. The Library of Congress control number is n98091758. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1956, 1998, 2006 and 1989.
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This entry incorporates text from “Simon Brown (author)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.