Kieron Gillen

Born in Britain on 30 September 1975, Kieron Gillen came to comics after working as a video game and music journalist, a background that would visibly inform the pop-culture-saturated worlds he later built on the page. His earliest significant comics work, Phonogram (2006–2016), co-created with artist Jamie McKelvie, established the partnership and sensibility that would define much of his creator-owned output.

That collaboration deepened considerably with The Wicked + The Divine (2014–2019), an Image series exploring gods reincarnated as pop stars, which earned Gillen a Hugo Award nomination and became one of the more discussed ongoing series of its decade. At Marvel through the early 2010s, he helmed Journey into Mystery, Uncanny X-Men, and Young Avengers — the last of which won a GLAAD Media Award and demonstrated his facility with character-driven superhero work. His Star Wars run in the mid-to-late 2010s introduced Doctor Aphra, a morally slippery archaeologist who proved popular enough to anchor her own series, of which Gillen wrote the first nineteen issues. He returned to Marvel's mutant line in the 2020s across the Krakoan Age's Destiny of X, Sins of Sinister, and Fall of X storylines.

His creator-owned series Die (2018–2021), a dark meditation on role-playing games, brought him two British Fantasy Awards and three Hugo nominations. Once & Future (2019–2022) earned three additional Hugo nominations.