Born in Sardinia in 1974, Roberto Campus grew up near Rome asking the kinds of questions most people learn to set aside. He has worked as a fantasy illustrator for Marvel, LucasArts, DC Comics and Penguin Books, as an orchestral composer under the name Music of the Old Gods, as a software architect, and as a theoretical physicist developing the FLUX Theory. It looks like five careers. It is one long inquiry wearing different clothes.

The Violet Engine is his first novel. He lives in Sardinia with his wife, the author Jenn Campus, their children, several cats, and a Border Collie unimpressed by every grand theory.