Hoban was born in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia, to Jewish immigrants from Ostrog (now in Ukraine). His father, Abram T. Hoban, was the advertising manager of the Yiddish-language

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Hoban had four children with his first wife, Lillian Aberman Hoban. Their daughter Phoebe Hobanis a journalist and biographer who specializes in art. The couple divorced in 1975, and in the same year he married Gundula Ahl, who worked in the fashionable London

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The last of Hoban's novels published during his lifetime was Angelica Lost and Found (October 2010), in which the hippogriff from Girolamo da Carpi's Ruggiero Saving Angelica breaks free from the 16th-century painting to search for Angelica in 21st-century

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In May 1998, Dave Awl, a writer/performer with the experimental Chicago theatre troupe the Neo-Futurists, launched the first comprehensive Russell Hoban reference website, The Head of

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Hoban is often described as a fantasy writer, and only two of his novels, Turtle Diary and The Bat Tattoo, are entirely devoid of supernatural elements. However, the fantasy elements are

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How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen (1974), a picture book written by Hoban, illustrated by Quentin Blake, and

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In 1984, Hoban collaborated with the Impact Theatre Co-operativeon a performance entitled The Carrier Frequency. Hoban supplied the text for the piece, which was staged and performed by Impact. In 1999, The Carrier Frequency was restaged by the

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