The title of Neil Gaiman’s 2013 novel, The Ocean and the End of the Lane has been commemorated by Portsmouth City Council by renaming a street on the Southsea seafront in its honour.

Neil Gaiman (b.10 Nov. 1960, Portchester) is a world-renowned author whose impressive output includes adult and children’s fiction, novels, graphic novels, non-fiction, theatre, and movies. His work includes Don’t Panic: The Official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Companion (with M.J.Simpson, 1989), Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett, 1990), The Sandman series (1989–2013), Stardust (1997), American Gods (2001), Coraline (2003), The Graveyard Book (2008), and The Ocean and the End of the Lane (2013). Following again in the footsteps of Douglas Adams, Gaiman has written several episodes of BBC’s Dr Who.

Gaiman’s ancestors, who were of Polish-Jewish origin, moved to Portsmouth before WWI, changing their name from Chairman to Gaiman. Gaiman spent the first five years of his life in Portchester before the family moved to East Grinstead, where his family were strongly involved in scientology. Gaiman’s early reading of Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis,Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Dennis Wheatley, and proved influential in the direction his later writing career would take into highly imaginative and psychologically powerful work. During the 1980s he worked as a journalist, and published his first short story in 1984. Since then his literary, film, and TV work has flourished. In 1992 he moved to the United States, and currently holds a post at Bard College, New York.

ENTRY: Dr Mark Frost, Department of English, University of Portsmouth. If you have any comments or suggestions please email: mark.frost@port.ac.uk