Gary Crew was born on September 23, 1947 in Brisbane, Australia. Gary attended State Primary and High Schools in Brisbane, English and Art were his favorite subjects, but he left school aged 16 to become a cadet Civil Engineering Draftsman. After he had graduated from the Queensland Institute of Technology and worked in a drawing office for ten years as a design draftsman, he became bored and decided to become a teacher. After that, Crew re-educated himself, earning his master's degree in literature at Queensland University. He became a teacher in 1974 and went on to become head of English at various high schools in Brisbane. Gary Crew began writing fiction in 1985. Because of his teaching… background and his own teenage children, he entered the Teenage Fiction or Young Adult genre and has published 12 novels in that field. He has twice been awarded the Children's Book Council of Australia, Book of the Year for Older Readers, for Strange Objects in 1991 and Angel's Gate in 1993. Gary has also been twice short listed for the Edgar Allan Poe Mystery Fiction Award for Youth in the USA and awarded the American Children's Book of Distinction. Among his many awards is the Ned Kelly Prize for Crime Fiction. He also specializes in fiction texts for Illustrated Books for Older Readers. He has won the CBC Book of the Year twice in the Picture Book category, for First Light in 1993 and The Watertower in 1994. He was short listed for this award in 2000 with Memorial. He is the series Editor of Lothian's After Dark series of Macabre Tales. Crew is a lecturer in Creative Writing, Children's and Adult Literature at the University of the Sunshine Coast. He is the Chair of the Queensland Writers' Centre.