Nelson, Dr Graham

Graham is a British mathematician and poet. He studied geometry in his undergraduate at Cambridge and went on to earn a doctorate at Magdalen College, Oxford, under Simon Donaldson’s supervision before becoming a fellow in pure mathematics at St Anne’s. During this time, he developed his activity as a creative writer and created the Inform design system for creating interactive fiction (IF) games. A radical reinvention of the tool-chain needed to make interactive fiction, Inform breaks away from C- or LISP-like languages in favour of natural language, and has for the last decade been the widest-used system of its kind in the world. Though devised for interactive story-telling, Inform has also been used in education, theoretical architecture and a surprising range of other fields. Graham has also authored several IF games, including Curses (1993) and Jigsaw (1995). A short autobiographical account of Graham’s life and his creation of Curses can be read here. Graham has published in the fields of computer science, pure mathematics, literary criticism and poetry. In recognition of his work as a scholarly editor, he is managing editor of Legenda, the imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA).