Michael Scott Rohan

Rohan's author profile from Orion Books states that he was diagnosed as incurably ill in 2000, and after that, stopped writing fiction. He died in Edinburgh on 12 August 2018, aged 67.

Rohan "from an early age ... read voraciously, everything from Dan Dare to the Larousse Mythology, Conan Doyle, C. S. Lewis (Out of the Silent Planet, not Narnia), Tolkien, and his older sister's copy of Lady Chatterley". He had interests in anthropology, history, archaeology (which had extended to participating in excavations), and palaeontology, but also cinema, hifi, and home entertainment. He was for two years a columnist for the London Times, and also at one time "a music journalist, a columnist and reviewer for Music Magazine and Opera Now in its first two years", and a regular contributor to "Classic CD, International Opera Collector, and others, as well as creating and editing The Classical Video Guide (1994)". As of 2011, he was still contributing to opera publications.

According to his entry on the website of the Little, Brown Book Group, "after many years in Oxford and Yorkshire (they moved to Leeds in 1984), he and his American wife Deborah (Archives Conservator for Cambridgeshire) lived (as of 1994) in a small village near Cambridge, next to the pub."

He asserted that during his time studying, and after, he held various casual jobs, including "librarian, software technical writer, editor, translator, and shipping rare botanical specimens around the world". Achieving his Masters in 1973, Rohan left the legal field and went to work for an international publishing firm editing encyclopedias. This job he held for five years, until taking voluntary redundancy in 1978. It was at this point he began writing some of the works for which he is now best known – The Hammer and the Cross and Run to the Stars.

Michael Scott Rohan (22 January 1951 – 12 August 2018) was a Scottish fantasy and science fiction author and writer on opera.

Rohan was born in 1951 in Edinburgh, in, apparently, the house next door to that of the author Robert Louis Stevenson. He was educated at the Edinburgh Academy and St Edmund Hall, Oxford University where, having initially planned to study English, changed to study law. It was during his time as a student that he joined the Science Fiction group. Here he met the Group's president, Allan Scott, who would later become his co-author of several books. He also met his future wife, Philadelphia native and Stanford post-graduate Deborah, through the Group. The couple married in 1977.