In May 2006, Harlan Ellison was named the 2006 Grand Master Laureate of the Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers of America.

Harlan Ellison was recently characterized by The New York Times Book Review as having “the spellbinding quality of a great nonstop talker, with a cultural warehouse for a mind.” The Los Angeles Times suggested, “It’s long past time for Harlan Ellison to be awarded the title: 20th Century Lewis Carroll.” And the Washington Post Book World said simply, “One of the great living American short story writers.”

He has written or edited 76 books; more than 1700 stories, essays, articles, and newspaper columns; two dozen teleplays, for which he received the Writers Guild of America most outstanding teleplay award for solo work an unprecedented four times; and a dozen movies. Currently a member of the Writers Guild of America, he has twice served on the board of the WGAw. He won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe award twice, the Horror Writers’ Association Bram Stoker award six times (including The Lifetime Achievement in 1996), the Nebula award of the Science Fiction Writers of America three times, the Hugo (World Convention Achievement award) 8 times, and received the Silver Pen for Journalism from P.E.N—Not to mention The World Fantasy Award; the British Fantasy Award; the American Mystery Award; plus two Audie Awards and a Grammy nomination for Spoken Word recordings.

He created great fantasies for the 1985 CBS revival of THE TWILIGHT ZONE (including Danny Kaye’s final performance) and THE OUTER LIMITS; traveled with The Rolling Stones; marched with Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery; created roles for Buster Keaton, Wally Cox, Gloria Swanson and nearly 100 other stars on BURKE’S LAW; ran with a kid gang in Brooklyn’s Red Hook to get background for his first novel; covered race riots in Chicago’s “back of the yards” with the late James Baldwin; sang with, and dined with, Maurice Chevalier; once stood off the son of the Detroit Mafia kingpin with a Remington XP-100 pistol-rifle, while wearing nothing but a bath towel; sued Paramount and ABC-TV for plagiarism and won $337,000. His most recent legal victory, in protection of global Internet piracy of writers’ work, in May of 2004—a 4-year-long litigation against AOL et al.—has resulted in revolutionizing protection of creative properties on the web. (As promised, he has repaid hundreds of contributions [totaling $50,000] from the KICK Internet Piracy support fund.) But the bottom line, as voted by Booklist last year, is this: “One thing for sure: this man can write.”