Meet the Author

Jay Veloso Batista

I have always been fascinated with history and literature. An imaginative child, I devoured books of all sorts, especially adventure novels by Robert Louis Stephenson (‘Treasure Island,’ ‘Kidnapped’), Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan, Barsoom, and Pellucidar’s “Hollow Earth”), Alistair MacLean (‘Substation Zero,’ ‘The Guns of Navarone,’ ‘Where Eagles Dare,’ etc.) the Doc Savage pulp novels and comic books. Told to “find something to read” to stay occupied in class at age 12, I found “1984” on the shelf and began reading Fantasy and Science Fiction works by Tolkien (‘The Hobbit’ and ‘LOTR’), Lieber (‘Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser’), CS Lewis (‘Lion, Witch & Wardrobe’), Azimov, Heinlein, Simak, Lem, the collected works of Phillip K. Dick and many more. At university I studied English Literature and Composition, where I chewed through the classics, earning an undergraduate Bachelor of Arts in English and later a Masters. While still in school I won an award for poetry which came with a cash prize, so important when you are a starving college student, and after graduating I began free-lancing in my spare time during the 1980’s, providing games and defining adventure worlds for TSR, the publisher of ‘AD&D: Advanced Dungeon & Dragons.’