Randall Silvis is an internationally acclaimed American author, known for his works in various creative writing fields, including plays, historical mystery and thriller books, essays, articles, poems, and short stories. He is best known for his Ryan DeMarco Mystery series and the Edgar Allan Poe series.
Silvis has received numerous awards for his literary contributions, including two writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize, a Fulbright Senior Scholar Research Award, and six fellowships for his fiction, drama, and screenwriting from the Pennsylvania Council On the Arts. He has also been awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree for his distinguished literary achievement. His work has been translated into ten languages and is available in over two hundred editions in several countries.
Born in Pennsylvania, Silvis was drawn to life's oddities from a young age, which is reflected in his writing. He has a particular affinity for the numinous, which can be traced back to his Portuguese and Scottish roots, with his last name, Silvis, meaning "from the woods" and his first name, Randall, meaning "shield wolf." This solitary and mysterious personality is evident in his characters and stories, which have been described as magical realism, mystery, mainstream, literary, slipstream, fabulism, fantasy, dirty magic realism, and whatever else one might feel like calling them.
Silvis's writing is influenced by a wide range of authors, including Ray Bradbury, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner, John Fante, Irwin Shaw, Harvey Swados, Thomas Pynchon, Eudora Welty, James Lee Burke, Flannery O'Connor, Umberto Eco, Henry Miller, Stanley Elkin, Isaac Singer, Lewis Nordan, Borges, Barth, Ondaatje, Goyen, Beckett, Robbins, and Brautigan. His first book was labeled as magical realism, and his subsequent works have continued to explore the mystical and supernatural elements of life. Despite the variety of genres he has worked in, Silvis's writing is consistently characterized by his picturesque language, poetic descriptions, skillful metaphors, and deep understanding of human nature.