Michael Cox
Michael Cox was born in Northamptonshire in 1948. After graduating from Cambridge in 1971, he went into the music business as a singer/songwriter (under the name Matthew Ellis) before taking a job in publishing with Thorsons Publishing Group in 1977. His first book, published in 1983, was a widely praised biography of the scholar and ghost-story writer M.R. James. He then joined Oxford University Press as an editor, where he edited many literary anthologies, including The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories and The Oxford Book of Victorian Detective Stories. His first novel, The Meaning of Night, was written as he was losing his sight to cancer; the book became a critical success and was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award. The Glass of Time, a sequel to The Meaning of Night was published in 2008. Michael Cox died of a rare vascular cancer, in March 2009, at the age of 60.
