Lucifer Chu was born in 1975 and graduated from Taiwan’s National Central University in 1998 with a B.S in electrical engineering. He has dedicated himself in promoting fantasy literature because of his passion for PC games and fantasy fiction.

Since first knowing about fantasy literature in 1991 during his high school years, Lucifer Chu has spared no efforts to popularize it through writing columns in newspapers and magazines as well as establishing websites. Almost all of the translated fantasy novels and manuals of PC games related to fantasy literature in Taiwan are the works of Lucifer’s. From the Dragonlance Chronicle published in 1998 to the Lord of the Rings Trilogy sold over 700,000 volumes, Lucifer has translated 30 fantasy novels from English into Chinese. His continuous and hard-working efforts made the fantasy world that used to be relatively unpopular finally win the praise and support from Taiwan’s domestic market.

In Taiwan, the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, the so-called ultimate classic of all fantasy novels, had been best seller for over three months.(But before Chu’s translation, the same book sold only 3000 copies in 3 years.) It is estimated that the LOTR Trilogy was sold at least 220,000 sets in Taiwan. Before even receiving his royalty from the translated LOTR, Lucifer, an aspiring young man, decided to donate NT$10 million (US$300,000) to establish the first “Fantasy Foundation” around the world in a hope of promoting the fantasy culture and attracting more and more fantasy readers/players. Furthermore, through cultivating and training professionals, Lucifer hopes the Foundation can make fantasy literature really take roots in the Greater China area and bridge the gap between the ethnic Chinese literature and the entire world. In order to encourage young people to create their own fantasy world and use their imagination, Fantasy Foundation holds the Fantasy Culture Awards in four categories— fiction, painting, costume and props and short film, on a yearly basis that have attracted over one thousand contestants each time.

In 2002, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) officially launched the OpenCourseWare project, which is a free and open educational collection for university faculty, students, and self-learners around the world.  After Lucifer Chu learned the news, he quit his job from the Cite Publishing Group and engaged himself and the Foundation to organize a system to localize these educational materials from MIT. The Foundation has developed the Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (OOPS), a “bottom-up” open source model designed to facilitate the sharing of knowledge between the English and Chinese speaking worlds. The volunteer group has grown from 2 persons in Taiwan to 1,900 volunteers from 16 countries around the world within 800 days. With less than 70,000 US dollars expense, OOPS attracted over 3,000,000 visits since its debut on February 25^th of 2004.  The hits on OOPS’ web pages has accumulated to approximately 46,794,566 merely in 2005. OOPS also attracted over 1.2 million users in 2005. OOPS is now the biggest volunteer OCW localization group around the globe. After he received the Johnnie Walker Award and the Presidential Culture Award, Lucifer Chu again donated all the award money (NT$2 million in total) to the Fantasy Foundation.  At present, he has been flying around the world to meet with his volunteers and to promote OOPS as an alternative solution to developing countries for sharing and localizing the open knowledge.  Lucifer Chu has also given speeches at high schools around Taiwan and China, inspiring innovation in students.