Author of The Broken Empire, Book of the Ancestor and The Library Trilogies
We are so excited to be talking to Mark Lawrence, the author of numerous best-selling fantasy series including the captivating Library Trilogy. While his first series that instantly cemented his place in the fantasy landscape (The Broken Empire) was firmly grimdark, his range is extremely wide and every trilogy he has written has brought something original and compelling to the genre. His most recent endeavor, The Library Trilogy, is a richly developed story set in a vast library and explores the power of knowledge, themes of history and memory, and the isolation and connection found in the human experience. He is also the founder of the SPFBO competition that has helped bring light to so many talented indie authors that might not otherwise get the platform to show their work. We are delighted to share this conversation with all of you!
Q: Let me start off by saying how much of an honor it is to be having this conversation and we are grateful you are willing to give of your valuable time! Many know that you have not always been an author, and you actually have a PhD in Mathematics, working on things like the ‘Star Wars’ missile program and decision/reasoning theory. Can you share with us your early influences in the area of writing and talk about how your career evolved from this prior discipline to a full-time writer?
I think almost nobody has “author” as their first job – at least not a job that pays the bills. It’s one of those undertakings that you get better at, up to a point, simply by growing older. We accumulate experience and understanding of the sort that’s useful in telling stories.
I wanted to be a scientist from an early age (like my father was). I got a degree in physics, a Ph.D in an area of mathematics, and my first pay-the-bills job was as a research scientist. Something I kept doing up to 2015 when my 5th book was published and the large research centre where I worked suddenly closed down due to the internal politics of a global corporation.
Being an author was never an ambition of mine – it really didn’t enter my thinking. I read a lot of SFF, I played a lot of D&D (creating scenarios and running them), and I ran a fantasy Play-By-Mail game in the days before email. So, I was doing many writing-adjacent things. In my early 30s, I went on a creative writing course and later started writing short stories in online writing groups, but it was always just something I enjoyed rather than plotting a path to publication. It’s similar to the way that I am going climbing later today but don’t expect to make a living competing on the professional climbing circuit, or indeed to be in the top 95% of the climbers at the gym. I think that’s the healthiest approach to writing, especially since it takes a ton of luck in addition to being really good at writing in order for it to become a career.
Early fantasy favourites for me were Tolkien, Le Guin, Katherine Kurtz, Donaldson, Anne McCaffrey, Michael Moorcock…
Q: Your transition from non-author to published author was an unusually quick transition and is very unique in the industry. Can you walk us through how this happened and talk about your reaction to the reception of your first book, Prince of Thorns?
I have fairly little insight into how other authors get/got into print, so I really don’t know to what degree my experience was unusual. I mean, it’s a fairly binary transition from non-published to published. I guess these days a number of people will self-publish and then move into traditional publishing.
I just sent off a query letter to four agencies and was lucky enough that my book happened to be the sort that was popular at the time. One agent wrote back to say he’d take me on. He warned that getting a deal would be a slow business. The unusual part of my journey was that a whole bunch of publishers jumped at the book rather quickly, and a bidding war got me a very nice advance. And of course, the more a publisher spends up front on a book, the more they push it, which will guarantee you some initial success. After that, it’s down to whether individual readers recommend the book to their friends.
Prince of Thorns was labelled ‘grimdark’, a term I’d never heard of, but which helped sell it, partly through wrapping it into a heated online debate about grimdark as a subgenre, one that still rumbles on today well over a decade later.
It sold very well early on and is still the book of mine I’m most likely to see in bookshops. In the UK the paperback is in its 31st printing.
Q: Your first trilogy is the well-known Broken Empire Trilogy with a protagonist you hate to love, Jorg Ancrath. This first trilogy put you on the map as an author and from my personal reading, I found there to be quite a progression and growth in the character and the writing, even within that first trilogy. Can you tell us about the writing of that trilogy and what you learned as a writer from the start to the finish?
Prince of Thorns was written to an online writing group, chapter by chapter, over the course of several years and was finished about 4 years before I got around to sending it to agents. King of Thorns and Emperor of Thorns took about 6 months each to write in the gap between Prince of Thorns getting a book deal (for a trilogy) and it actually being published. I was working as a scientist through all of this and being the main caretaker for my profoundly disabled youngest child.
I’m not a planner. I make stories up as I go. People, especially young people, are shaped by their experiences. Thus, a teenaged main character is bound to grow and change over the course of three books covering more than five years. If they didn’t it would be bad writing.
My writing is always changing from trilogy to trilogy. I get bored and try different styles and different vibes. But I guess The Broken Empire is the trilogy that contains writing from the widest time period and also at a time when I had written far fewer words of fiction.
I can’t point to any writing lessons I’ve learned. It’s not about epiphanies for me – it’s more incremental and stored in muscle memory. Plus, some readers will say that my best writing is in Prince of Thorns/The Broken Empire (though really because that book/trilogy appeals to their tastes most), so I can’t really claim to have learned anything.
I guess a thing I learned for me is to keep trying new stuff – that maintains my interest and gives me energy. But commercially, a writer is probably best off writing more and more of whatever it was that was most successful. If I was currently on book 18 of the Broken Empire I would very likely have much more cash in my bank account.
Q: The Broken Empire Trilogy is considered a staple and early entry into the modern “Grimdark Fantasy” sub-genre that is now a much more crowded space than when you originally wrote Prince of Thorns. At the time of writing, were you consciously writing a story with the intention of subverting tropes within the fantasy genre (particularly the depiction of Prince Oren vs Jorg Ancrath), or was the moral ambiguity of the protagonist just a byproduct of the type of main character that you wanted to build the story around?
My influence for Jorg – and Prince of Thorns is all about this one character – was much earlier than anything going on in fantasy at the time. I was inspired by the character Alex DeLarge from Anthony Burgess’s classic work A Clockwork Orange (published in 1962).
I had also read George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire which had coloured my imagination, reawaking my flagging interest in fantasy with the realization that it could be presented in terms that felt far more real to me and less idealized than some of the stuff I’d been reading that had a more mythic or fairytale feel to it.
At the time the word ‘trope’ wasn’t in my vocabulary, and I wasn’t trying to subvert anything. My main influence was harking back to a book written half a century previously.
Q: The majority of your works have been firmly anchored in the fantasy genre with a little science fiction sprinkled in. Has fantasy always been a favorite of yours and would you ever consider writing hard science fiction (you have called The Impossible Times Trilogy science-lite) with your background? Is there any other genre you could see yourself being interested in at some point in the future?
Well, there’s definitely a science fiction element in all my works. The explanation for magic in The Broken Empire appeals to quantum mechanics, and the next trilogy (The Red Queen’s War) ends up at a particle accelerator. So, in many senses, I’ve been writing sci-fi all along.
I did recently complete a comedy sci-fi featuring spaceships and robots. I wouldn’t call it hard science fiction though. I find hard sci-fi a bit dry for my tastes. I don’t think I want to have to scientifically justify everything that happens any more than I want to write historical fantasy and have arguments with history buffs about the state of sewer technology in 12th-century Burgundy.
But you never know – I do like to switch things up.
Q: One of your most-loved trilogies, The Book of the Ancestor Trilogy, focuses on a young girl, Nona, and has a much different tone than the world of The Broken Empire. It features a very unique setting and magic system that I hadn’t encountered in my reading before. Was your process for creating these aspects of the trilogy a quick development or did it evolve over time and what inspirations did you draw from, if any?
I would say that each of my trilogies has a much different tone than the others. I don’t feel you can say any one of them was like the other. That’s not a great commercial strategy, but it keeps me happy as a writer.
The essential elements of the world building for Red Sister popped into my head whilst walking the dog and I started the book when I got back home. The ice-bound planet and slowly closing equatorial ice-free channel were a physical realization of the simple mechanic that Peter V Brett discussed with me when talking about his own books. The demons that emerge from the ground every night in his Demon Cycle books exist as a mechanism to apply stress to humanity, and thus to his characters. The real story is the characters and how they react to the stress, and with each other under stress. I imagined it like the classic shrinking room in films, where the walls close in (as seen in Star Wars or Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). The behaviour of the trapped individuals is compelling.
In Red Sister, the “shrinking room” effect is provided by giant ice walls slowly grinding inwards with countries and cities and nations trapped between them. It’s a vise that is tightening all the time on our characters.
All the rest was elaboration that appeared as I wrote.
Q: Naturally it takes a host of well-developed elements to create a good story like general prose, characterization, world-building, narrative, plot-pacing and many other elements. Is there an area that you feel like comes most naturally to you as an author and are there any areas that you need to consciously work harder to develop as you approach the development of a story?
I’ve been to two climbing walls recently. It’s a very difficult sport at which I am really bad. Potentially you can train for climbing, but many people just climb. One of the best ways to train for climbing is climbing. I feel it’s the same with writing. I am aware that I am better at writing some kinds of things than others, but I’ve never “worked on” any aspect of writing. I just do it. I also never feel that I’m getting better or worse at writing. That’s for others to judge – though generally those judgements are really just answers to the question “is this writer’s output becoming closer to the type I like or more distant?”.
Q: Since many of our readers are also book collectors, they will be familiar with the special treatment your books are getting from Grim Oak Press and The Broken Binding among other box subscriptions. Can you tell us how you first got involved with Shawn at Grim Oak and what it means to have your books get the small press treatment? Are you a book collector in any respect?
That question made me think. I’ve known Shawn – in a semi-distant internet sense – for a very long time. I joined the now-defunct Terry Brooks forum well over a decade ago. Probably in 2010. And Shawn was the head moderator there. And so when he first got cancer and was faced with these huge medical bills I was quick to sign up to the anthology he was putting together to help pay them off.
I believe that Grim Oak Press was formed in order to publish that anthology. Shawn had great contacts in the writing world and the anthology had a stellar roll call. I was included among the “and others” on the cover.
I guess the special editions came about through chats that Shawn and I had on Facebook or email about the possibilities. I was interested in the “old book” look, and really wanted to have my own copy of The Broken Empire in a leather-bound edition with the ridges on the spine like books in the libraries of stately homes have. And Shawn made that happen.
I have lots of books – the house is filled with bookshelves. The idea of “nice” editions does appeal to me but to be honest I’ve never gone out and spent the money on them. So really the only high-quality books I have (in terms of binding and production) are my own ones from Grim Oak Press and Broken Binding, and a handful of anthologies and a few that I’ve been sent. I did buy high quality editions (a boxed set) of the complete Calvin and Hobbes. And also, the Sandman graphic novels by Gaiman.
Q: You are close to finishing your newest series called The Library Trilogy, in which only two of three books have been released. The final book, The Book That Held Her Heart, is scheduled to release next year. As a bunch of bibliophiles, I think our readers will easily connect with the setting and themes. This trilogy wrestles with so many complex concepts like the fragmentation and consequences of knowledge, the role of stories in our lives and societies, censorship and control, as well as the search for truth and what drives our subjective journeys. Can you talk about how long you have been working on creating this unique world and was it a fully fleshed-out idea from the start or has it been evolving as you have continued on with the series?
Heh.
I always feel I should lie and portray a more flattering image of the process that adds a sense of depth…
First off, book 3 will be out in April (2025) but I’d finished all three books before the first one was published. I’ve written four more books since finishing The Book That Held Her Heart. So, in some senses all this is quite far back in the rear-view mirror for me.
Anyway, the truth is that almost nothing was worked out in advance at any point. I invent the story as I go. But of course, writing a book takes some time. For me that’s normally less than a year, but also normally most of a year. And in a year of life where your job is “writing a book”, you will naturally do a lot of thinking about that story and the ideas that orbit around it. A whole bunch of that thinking is subconscious. I might spend an hour doing something different or dull, then have a coffee and an idea/concept pops into the foreground and I think, “I’ll put that in the book.”
The whole business of living in the modern world and watching it change over decades is basically research for these books. It’s another example of why it’s easier to be an author once you’ve lived some life, suffered tragedy, raised children, been sick, got older, observed changes in yourself and others. All of those things are raw material that can be projected through various lenses onto a blank page. And they’re things that resonate with others and make the adventures your characters are going through seem more real and more vital.
Q: Your stories always seem to pull out deeper themes than the typical fantasy novel, but The Library Trilogy has felt particularly poignant and even didactic at times, though never at the expense of the narrative. Was there something more urgent and pointed you were trying to communicate at this exact point in time or are the themes just so universal that it feels timely and relevant?
The books certainly aren’t intended to be instructional. At the heart of the story are two camps who have very different goals regarding the Library and, from my point of view, both have strong arguments in their favour. For the vast majority of the trilogy, I had no idea how to resolve that conflict, and I certainly didn’t intend for readers to feel driven to one or the other of those positions. The best books – in my view – centre on the difficulty of a question rather than trying to convince the reader of any particular answer to it.
The urgency – if it can be called that – is to highlight the consequences of having a strong opinion and the information bubbles that can be created around them. It’s not to convince anyone that their opinion is wrong – simply to encourage all of us to look at the way we arrive at our position and the unconscious ways we protect ourselves from information that might weaken what we feel are purely logical conclusions.
Q: Each trilogy you have written has a very unique protagonist and they have been all over the map in terms of motivation, drive, empathy, personality, etc. What has been your favorite character to write and are there any characters that you resonate with personally and their own position and struggle within their world?
I enjoy writing all my characters and they all resonate with me – I wouldn’t bother with them otherwise. Having said that, Jalan Kendeth (The Red Queen’s War/Prince of Fools) has been the most fun to write. He’s funny, often unintentionally, unapologetic, and cowardly. It’s a refreshing change to write a character whose reaction to danger is close to my own. Running away is the natural reaction to violence and threat. Many of us lose a lot of our moral objections to various courses of action when the alternative is being stabbed in the face. So, Jalan was definitely the most fun to write. That’s not the same as rewarding though. Each of my main characters has different things to offer emotionally. And exploring that has kept me satisfied.
Q: You created the SPFBO (Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off) almost 10 years ago, which highlights self-published authors and gives them a chance to have a larger platform and wider audience than they might normally be able to reach. Many of the winning authors are now well-known within the fantasy landscape like M.L. Wang, Rob J. Hayes and Justin Lee Anderson. What was your inspiration for starting this annual event and what are you most proud of reflecting back now that you are on the 10th annual event?
I learned to write by engaging and sharing in online writing groups. Prince of Thorns was shared to a group chapter by chapter, and the people who critiqued me, I critiqued in turn.
So, when I lucked out and was given a sizeable book deal, I was aware of how many great writers there were out there who could so easily be standing in my shoes. I never expected the traditional publishing process to be fair – which is a part of why it took me several years between writing Prince of Thorns and half-heartedly sending it off to agents. But understanding how large a role luck played made me want to at least give some fellow authors another roll of the dice.
Additionally, as self-publishing became more popular, I could see the struggles of other writers to get any eyes at all on their work. At the time, self-pub got a lot of bad press regarding quality, and many readers wouldn’t try it after hearing about badly written or poorly edited books. I thought that the contest could provide a means by which more readers gained the confidence to invest time and money into some self-published titles. We were saying, ‘don’t worry – you don’t have to read through these 300 books to find the ones that most appeal to you, have these trusted bloggers do the work and offer up some favourites’. And what am I most proud of? I guess that the best answer is the way the contestants come together to support each other. It could have been a bitter conflict but instead it turned out to be a rising tide.
Q: You have been clear that the selection process isn’t perfect and that there are great books that may not end up being selected. Many of us know the story of Josiah Bancroft’s Book of Babel series not making it through, but gaining popularity nonetheless because of your support. Were there any other books that didn’t end up winning or even making it into the finals that have gone on to commercial success? What were some of your favorites that didn’t win the year they were entered?
Absolutely, there have been many already successful authors whose books did not do well in the SPFBO, and other authors who met with limited success in the SPFBO who have gone on to great things. It’s hard to keep track of ~300 titles a year, but I know that Ryan Cahill, who is enjoying great popularity at the moment, had his entry fall at the first hurdle. Also, James Islington’s book The Shadow of What Was Lost didn’t make the finals (it was a semi-finalist) and yet went on to sell large numbers. As a slow reader I can only try out a very small number of the entries each year. I think my favourite non-winner after Senlin Ascends was Paternus by Dyrk Ashton – but that did come in 3rd.
Q: What should we be looking forward to coming from you after the third book of The Library Trilogy is complete?
I’m contracted to write a new trilogy for 2026/7/8 – the working title of book 1 is Hag, and it features an older female protagonist, 60+ years of age, in a more grimdark setting than I’ve written since The Broken Empire.
I’ve also recently completed a standalone companion to The Library Trilogy, a space comedy with robots, and a book about an AI gaining consciousness. Whether any of those will be published by my existing publishers (who like to stick to one book per year for me) or self-published, I don’t know.
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For those who are completely new to Mark’s work, he has created a very helpful guide to navigate where you might want to start with a brief description of each trilogy:
This interview was done in a series of communications back and forth and I want to give a special thanks to Mark who was so gracious to take the time to do this interview. If you want to get more information on his books and latest news, check out his blog. You can also follow him on Instagram or join his Patreon for even more unique and tailored content.
Interview by: Zach Harney a co-founder of the Collectible Book Vault
Another excellent interview. I'm certainly grateful for the SPFBO for bringing more attention to lesser known works and am looking forward to the Wraithmarked editions of the winners. It is interesting that he says the trilogies were written with different styles and vibes, as I usually don't like grimdark and only read the first two books in the Red Queen's War, but now I am curious about the other series. The Library trilogy sounds the most appealing to me, but I would love to know what other grimdark-averse readers think about them all.