Born in Birmingham, England, Nigel Anthony Sellars spent his childhood outside Montreal, Quebec, and has lived in and around Oklahoma City, in a small town in Nebraska, in Los Angeles, and in Newport News, Virginia, where he is an associate professor of history at Christopher Newport University. 

He has been, at times, an actor, a folksinger in a Celtic music band, a motel night clerk, a convenience store clerk, a welfare intake worker, an research assistant working with chimpanzees, a rat-runner in a psych lab, and a multiple award-winning journalist. He holds degrees in psychology, and history from the University of Oklahoma. A graduate of the professional writing program in the School of Journalism at the University of Oklahoma, he studied with noted novelists Jack M. Bickham, Robert L. Duncan and Carolyn Hart. He earned his doctorate in history from OU in 1994. The author of numerous articles, both non-scholarly and scholarly, he also has had his fiction has appeared in such magazines as Visions, Beyond, Alpha Adventures, Space & Time, Oracle and Out of the Cradle and has been translated into Russian. Most of his short stories appear in his 2002 collection, The Confessions of Caliban and Other Stories. .  His scholarly writings have twice been honored by the Oklahoma Historical Society, including the prestigious Muriel Wright Award for his Chronicles of Oklahoma article "Almost Hopeless in the Face of the Storm" about the deadly 1917 Spanish Flu pandemic in the state.