Glen Hirshberg

Glen Martin Hirshberg (born June 5, 1966 in Royal Oak, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan) is an American author best known for horror fiction.

Born to parents Linda Hirshberg (psychologist) and Jerry Hirshberg (painter, founder of Nissan Design International, and author of The Creative Priority), Hirshberg began telling stories at the age of three.

"My mother was a psychologist, my father a designer and painter, and I think their influence still resonates through everything I write. I can’t draw a straight line, but I love painting with the language, and what interests me most in stories, even the spooky ones, is the way people respond to and discover one another as their lives unfold or unravel."

This formative experience finds outlet in the plot of Hirshberg's first novel The Snowman's Children which, as Publishers Weekly relates, is the story of an adult coming to terms with his "1970s suburban childhood. In the winter of 1977, a serial killer dubbed "The Snowman" haunted a quiet Michigan neighborhood, preying on the town's children."

Hirshberg was ten years old in 1976 when the Oakland County Child Killer began to kidnap and kill children in his neighborhood.

In 1980, Hirshberg moved with his family to Southern California when his father, Jerry Hirshberg, took a job with Nissan Design.

Hirshberg graduated from Torrey Pines High School before earning his B.A. from Columbia University in 1988, where he won the Bennett Cerf Prize, and his M.A. and M.F.A. from the University of Montana in Missoula in 1991.

Hirshberg then moved to Seattle where he worked as a music critic and writer for the Seattle Weekly among other publications.

He currently teaches and lives with his family in the Los Angeles area.

"Mr. Dark's Carnival" was nominated for the 2000 International Horror Guild Award for Long Story.

and was a World Fantasy nominee for Best Novella of the year in 2001.

His works include the novel The Snowman's Children, published in limited edition by Earthling Publications and reissued for wider distribution in 2002 by Carroll & Graf, a short story collection The Two Sams, published in 2003 by Carroll & Graf; the collection American Morons, published in 2006 by Earthling Publications; the collection The Janus Tree, published in 2012 by Subterranean Press; the novel The Book of Bunk, published in 2010 by Earthling Publications, and the novel Motherless Child which was first published in a limited run by Earthling in 2012.

"Struwwelpeter," was nominated in the Best Novella category for the World Fantasy Award in 2002.

The Two Sams received an International Horror Guild Award for Outstanding Collection in 2003 and was selected as a Publishers Weekly Best Book for that same year.

"Dancing Men" won an International Horror Guild Award for Mid-Length Fiction in 2003 and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella in 2004.

In addition, The Two Sams was also nominated for the 2004 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection.

Stories in the collection were also very well received.

Stories from the Rolling Darkness Revue (2005–Present) have been anthologized by Earthling Publications.

It received an International Horror Guild Award for Outstanding Collection in 2006; "The Muldoon," one of the stories from that collection, was also nominated for the 2006 International Horror Guild Award for Mid-Length Fiction.

The collection American Morons was nominated for the 2007 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection and for the Bram Stoker Award for Fiction Collection.

Its titular story, "The Janus Tree," was nominated for a 2007 International Horror Guild Award for Mid-Length Fiction and awarded a 2007 Shirley Jackson Award.

The novel Motherless Child earned critical acclaim (the Los Angeles Review of Books states: “Always one of his generation’s finest stylists, its most able students of character, [Hirshberg] has written one of the best books of the year.”) and earned both a Booklist and a Publishers Weekly starred review.

With Peter Atkins and Dennis Etchison, Hirshberg co-founded the Rolling Darkness Revue, a reading and dramatic production which appears (like the carnival in "Mr. Dark's Carnival") in different venues and with appearances by different horror authors every year.

The collection The Janus Tree was a finalist for a 2011 Shirley Jackson Award.

This book sold out before publication and was reissued for wider distribution in May, 2014 by Tor Books as the initial book of a trilogy.

The second book of the trilogy Good Girls was released February, 2016, and the third book of the series is in progress.