Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany (1878-1957), was an Anglo-Irish writer and dramatist; his work, mostly in the fantasy genre, was published under the name Lord Dunsany. His oeuvre includes many hundreds of published short stories, as well as plays, novels and essays. He achieved great fame and success with his early short stories and plays, and during the 1910s was considered one of the greatest living writers of the English-speaking world; he is today best known for his 1924 fantasy novel The King of Elfland's Daughter and The Gods of Pegāna, wherein he devised his own fictional pantheon and laid the groundwork for the fantasy genre. He was the inventor of an asymmetric version of chess called Dunsany's chess.
