George R. R. Martin

George Raymond Martin was born on September 20, 1948, in Bayonne, New Jersey. The Richard came later, as a confirmation name at 13. As a kid he was already selling monster stories to the other children in the neighborhood for a few pennies each. He studied journalism at Northwestern University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1970 and a master's in 1971.

His first professional sale was the short story "The Hero," published in Galaxy magazine in 1971. To pay the bills he worked as a chess tournament director, which let him write full time from 1973 to 1976. He then taught English and journalism at Clarke College in Iowa until 1979, when he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to write for a living. He still lives there.

In the 1970s and 1980s he was a major name in science fiction and horror. The novelette "Sandkings" won both the Hugo and the Nebula in 1980. His first novel, Dying of the Light, came out in 1977. Fevre Dream, from 1982, puts vampires aboard a Mississippi River steamboat. The Armageddon Rag, from 1983, mixes horror with 1960s rock and sold poorly, which pushed Martin toward television.

In Hollywood he wrote for the 1985 revival of The Twilight Zone and was a writer and producer on Beauty and the Beast later in the decade. Dealing with budgets and cuts on TV left him wanting to go back to prose and write something with no size limit, full of characters, castles and battles. Around that time he also started running Wild Cards, a shared-world superhero anthology series by many authors that he still edits.

What came out of that was A Song of Ice and Fire. A Game of Thrones arrived in 1996. The setup: noble houses fight for power on a continent where seasons last for years, while an ancient threat stirs in the far north. A Clash of Kings (1998), A Storm of Swords (2000), A Feast for Crows (2005) and A Dance with Dragons (2011) followed. Each chapter follows one character's point of view, and politics matters as much as magic. Major characters can die at any moment, and that became his trademark. In 2005 Time called him "the American Tolkien," and in 2011 he made the Time 100. The sixth book, The Winds of Winter, still has no release date, and the seventh, A Dream of Spring, is meant to close the series.

Westeros kept growing sideways too. The Dunk and Egg novellas were collected in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (2015). The World of Ice & Fire (2014), written with Elio M. García Jr. and Linda Antonsson, covers the continent's history. Fire & Blood (2018) chronicles the Targaryen dynasty.

HBO adapted the saga as Game of Thrones, which ran from 2011 to 2019 and won multiple Emmys. House of the Dragon, based on Fire & Blood, followed in 2022, and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms in 2026. Martin also helped build the world of the video game Elden Ring (2022). In Santa Fe he bought and reopened the Jean Cocteau Cinema in 2013 and opened the bookstore Beastly Books in 2019. He has been married to Parris McBride since 2011.