By Courtney Weekley
Tobias Buckell, adjunct English professor at Bluffton University, graduated from Bluffton in 2000. Now he is a New York Times Bestselling and World Fantasy Award-winning author.
Buckell is originally from Grenada, West Indies, the southernmost island of the Grenadine Island chain in the Caribbean Sea.
Graduating with an English major, he learned to read and write at a very young age with ADHD and dyslexia.
Buckell grew up without a television so the majority of the time he would read books on his family’s boat. He would end up reading anywhere from one to two books a day.
Tobias Buckell on Zoom interview. Photo by Courtney Weekley.
Being the school menace, Buckell would read throughout his classes. A lot of the time he would get kicked out of his classes and get moved to the hallway. His teacher learned real fast that he would stand outside the door and dance. They then moved him to the library where he would read books and be utterly quiet.
In eighth grade his teachers were fed up with him not paying attention in class, so to keep up with his ADHD, he started to write stories instead of taking notes.
His family moved to central Ohio to live with his father’s stepdad. He started working at McDonald’s to pay his bills. And at the last minute, Buckell applied to colleges in the area to earn his degree and he was accepted at Bluffton.
“After I came to Bluffton and saw that the campus was navigable, it was much less daunting because I had no real mentorship,” said Buckell. “The schools I went to were small, so the idea of going to a small college really appealed to me.”
Since Bluffton, Buckell has published 10 novels, four short story collections, four novellas and has written 80 short stories in magazines such as “Lightspeed,” “Apex” and “Slate Magazine.” His most recent fantasy novel is called “The Tangled Lands.”
Buckell’s novel “Halo: The Cole Protocol” made the New York Times best-selling list. It was inspired by the Halo universe in the popular video game.
Buckell said, “When you’re in college, it might feel like you start to pick things and make big decisions but from my perspective here, you might as well branch out and try different things.”
