Born in Boston in 1960, Kurt Busiek grew up with three major family rules. No candy (bad for the teeth), no TV (bad for the brain) and no comic books (take the TV rule and double it). To this day, he credits those rules with his habit of picking up a book rather than turning on the TV, and his never having developed much of a sweet tooth. It didn’t help with the comics, though.

Kurt started reading comics regularly at the age of 14, around the time most kids his age were giving up on them. Soon, he and his friend Scott McCloud (who would go on to a successful comics career of his own), began to write and draw their own comics together, learning a great deal about the craft of making comics, and both decided that comics was the place for them.

By the time he graduated from Syracuse University in 1982, Kurt had already sold his first professional comics script – a backup story that appeared in Green Lantern #162, from DC Comics. Following that, he wrote Power Man and Iron Fist for Marvel Comics for about a year, and worked on such series as World’s Finest, Wonder Woman and Red Tornado.

Failing to get enough writing work to sustain a career, he worked as an assistant editor, as a literary agent and as a sales manager for Marvel, while co-creating such books as Liberty Project (which he wrote for Eclipse Comics) and Open Space (which he edited for Marvel).

He went full-time freelance for the second time in 1990, moving to Washington State. This time, he kept finding writing work, on books as diverse as Vampirella, Mickey Mouse, Web of Spider-Man and The Adventures of Jell-O Man.

In 1993, he and painter Alex Ross created Marvels, a 4-issue mini-series looking at the superheroic history of the Marvel Universe through the eyes of an ordinary man. Marvels was a commercial and critical smash, the breakthrough project that served as the foundation for Busiek's subsequent career.

Since then, Kurt has divided his time between writing mainstream series, including Avengers, Iron Man, Untold Tales of Spider-Man, Conan, Superman, JLA and Trinity, and creating his own projects, including Thunderbolts, The Power Company, Jonny Demon, The Wizard’s Tale, Shockrockets, Arrowsmith and the multiple-award-winning Astro City. He's worked with a variety of talented artists, including Brent Anderson, Mark Bagley, Carlos Pacheco, Stuart Immonen and Cary Nord.

Kurt has won over two dozen industry awards for his work. Among them are multiple Eisner Awards and Harvey Awards for Best Series, Best Single Issue and Best Writer. In 1996, Marvels was named a Best Book for Young Readers by the New York Public Library.

Kurt lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and two daughters.

This is an incomplete list of awards I've won over the years. I know I missed some, because, I'm embarrassed to admit, I didn't keep track of them—who knew I'd ever need to?—and so I put together the list from online sources. But I think I've got the major ones...

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Here's a listing of published works. Like the awards list, it's incomplete—I don't have most of the introductions and forewords and such that I've written, but I do have the bulk of the fiction. And I'm going to have to overhaul the whole thing eventually, to make it more user-friendly, list which titles are reprints (and what they reprint) and that sort of thing. In the meantime, though, if you know of something I've left off the list, drop me a line, and I'll get it in there the next time I update it.

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