Alastair Reynolds was born in Barry, South Wales. He has a Ph.D. in astronomy and since 1991 he has lived in the Netherlands, near Leiden, where he works part-time as an astrophysicist for the European Space Agency.
Reynolds is one of sci-fi's brightest stars. (He) writes Big Science Fiction. Enormous spaceships travel though space that feels galactic in scale, a feat of depiction that is still noteworthy in the genre. -- Keith Brooke THE GUARDIAN