Karpyshyn, Drew

PERSONAL: Married; wife’s name Jennifer. Education: Earned B.A.

ADDRESSES: Home— Sherwood Park, Alberta, Canada.

CAREER: BioWare, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, software developer and writer, 2000—. Also worked as a loans officer.

WRITINGS

Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, Wizards of the Coast (Renton, WA), 2001.

Temple Hill, Wizards of the Coast (Renton, WA), 2001.

Darth Bane: Path of Destruction, Del Rey Ballantine Books (New York, NY), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS: Drew Karpyshyn worked as a loans officer and investment advisor before a car accident left him without a vehicle to get to and from work each day. Karpyshyn used this as an excuse to move in a new direction with his life. After some additional secondary studies and a day on the television quiz show Jeopardy, Karpyshyn began work for BioWare, a software game publisher. Here he began writing scripts and story lines for various games. This resulted in novelizations of several of the games and led to his first published book in 2001, Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal.

Karpyshyn also began writing for the “Old Republic”Star Wars series and published Darth Bane: Path of Destruction in 2006. This book is set a thousand years before the onset of George Lucas’s six-part movie story line in a time when Jedi and Sith numbers were equal. Darth Bane reorganizes the Brotherhood of the Sith and clarifies the Rule of Two as he rises to the top of the hierarchy of the Dark Side of the Force. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly concluded that the book is “sure to satisfy the Star Wars faithful.” Dana Cobern-Kullman, reviewing the book for the School Library Journal, agreed that “fans won’t be disappointed,” and called the novel “an entertaining read, well written, and consistent in its history.”

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 1, 2006, Roland Green, review of Darth Bane: Path of Destruction, p. 67.

Hollywood Reporter, March 26, 2004, Chris Marlowe, “‘Knights’ Crowned Vid Games King,” p. 6.

Library Journal, August 1, 2006, Jackie Cassada, review of Darth Bane, p. 77.

Publishers Weekly, July 24, 2006, review of Darth Bane, p. 41.

School Library Journal, November, 2006, Dana Cobern-Kullman, review of Darth Bane, p. 171.*