

The first part of his viking-inspired Shattered Sea series for young and old adults, Half a King, came out in July 2014, when it won the Locus award for best young adult novel. A third standalone, Red Country, was both a Sunday Times and New York Times Hardcover Bestseller in October 2012. 3 on the Sunday Times Hardcover Bestseller List. Best Served Cold, a standalone book set in the same world, was published in June 2009, and a second standalone, The Heroes, came in January 2011 and made no. The sequels, Before They are Hanged and Last Argument of Kings were published in 20, when Joe was a finalist for the John W. It now has publishers in thirty countries. A year later The Blade Itself was unleashed on an unsuspecting public. Following a heart-breaking trail of rejection at the hands of several of Britain’s foremost literary agencies, The First Law trilogy was snatched up by Gillian Redfearn of Gollancz in 2005 in a seven-figure deal (if you count the pence columns). With heroic help and support from his family the first volume, The Blade Itself, was completed in 2004. This time, having learned not to take himself too seriously in the six years since the first effort, the results were a great deal more interesting. This job gave him lots of time off, and realising that he needed something more useful to do than playing video games, in 2001 he sat down once again to write an epic fantasy trilogy based around the misadventures of thinking man’s barbarian Logen Ninefingers. Two years later he left to become a freelance film editor, and has worked since on a range of documentaries, awards shows, music videos, and concerts for artists ranging from Barry White to Coldplay.

Joe then moved to London, lived in a slum with two men on the borders of madness, and found work making tea for minimum wage at a TV Post-Production company. The result was pompous toss, and swiftly abandoned. Having long dreamed of single-handedly redefining the fantasy genre, he started to write an epic trilogy based around the misadventures of thinking man’s barbarian Logen Ninefingers. The dice and the maps stopped, but the video games continued.

He went on to Manchester University to study Psychology. He was educated at the stiflingly all-boy Lancaster Royal Grammar School, where he spent much of his time playing video games, rolling dice, and drawing maps of places that don’t exist. Joe Abercrombie was born in Lancaster, England, on the last day of 1974.
