Harry Turtledove

Harry Norman Turtledove was born in Los Angeles on 14 June 1949; his paternal grandparents were Romanian Jews who emigrated first to Winnipeg and then to California. He dropped out of Caltech, finished his degree at UCLA and took a PhD in Byzantine history there in 1977 — training that shows in the alternate histories he then wrote, from a Byzantine Empire that survives to an alien invasion in the middle of the Second World War. The Guns of the South won the John Esten Cooke Award for Southern Fiction in 1993 and Down in the Bottomlands the Hugo Award for Best Novella in 1994. He is widely credited with making alternate history a genre publishers recognise.