Michael David O'Brien (born 1948) is a Canadian author, artist, and essayist and lecturer on faith and culture. Born in Ottawa, he is self-taught, without an academic background. He writes and speaks on Catholic themes and topics, and creates the cover art for his novels in a neo-Byzantine style. He lives with his family in Combermere, Ontario, Canada. O'Brien's books have been published in a number of foreign languages, including Croatian, Czech, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish. Early life O'Brien was born in Ottawa and lived in Kugluktuk (then known as Coppermine) from ages 12 to 16. He attended a residential school in Inuvik, where he says he was abused by a dormitory supervisor. He graduated from grade 12 at St Patrick's College High School only with difficulty. As a youth, he was agnostic, leaning towards atheism, until his conversion to Catholicism when he was 21. He began to draw and paint shortly after, and had a successful gallery exhibition. Five years later, at the urging of his wife, he began to turn his artwork towards religious subjects. In 1994, at the age of 46, he began to write. Works Fiction The Small Angel (White Horse Press, 1996) Island of the World (Ignatius Press, 2007) – Josip Lasta is the son of an impoverished school teacher in a remote village high in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Waiting: Stories for Advent (Justin Press, 2010, ) Theophilos (Ignatius Press, 2010) – Historic fiction centered on Theophilos, here portrayed as the adoptive father of St. Luke the Evangelist. Winter Tales (Justin Press, 2011) A Father's Tale (Ignatius Press, 2011) – Canadian bookseller Alex Graham is a middle-age widower whose quiet life is turned upside down when his college-age son disappears without any explanation or trace of where he has gone. With minimal resources, the father begins a long journey that takes him for the first time away from his safe and orderly world. Voyage to Alpha Centauri (Ignatius Press, 2013) – Set eighty years in the future, an expedition is sent from the planet Earth to Alpha Centauri, the star closest to our solar system. The Kosmos, a great ship that the central character Neil de Hoyos describes as a "flying city", is immense in size and capable of more than half light-speed. Hoyos, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who has played a major role in designing the ship, signs on as