George R. R. Martin

George R. R. Martin (born 1948) is an American novelist and screenwriter, author of the fantasy sequence A Song of Ice and Fire, which began with A Game of Thrones (1996) and was adapted as HBO's Game of Thrones.

George Raymond Martin was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, on 20 September 1948. He studied journalism at Northwestern University, taking a BS in 1970 and an MS in 1971. His first sale, "The Hero", appeared in Galaxy in February 1971, and his short fiction soon won major awards: "A Song for Lya" took the 1975 Hugo for best novella, and "Sandkings" won both the Hugo and the Nebula in 1980. His first novel, Dying of the Light, came out in 1977. In the mid-1980s he moved to Hollywood, working on the revived Twilight Zone and on Beauty and the Beast, and he helped develop the Wild Cards shared-world anthology series.

A Game of Thrones was published in August 1996 by Bantam in the US and HarperCollins Voyager in the UK, and won the 1997 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel. It was followed by A Clash of Kings (1998), A Storm of Swords (2000), A Feast for Crows (2005) and A Dance with Dragons (2011); The Winds of Winter is still awaited. HBO bought the rights in 2007, and the series ran from 2011 to 2019. Fire & Blood (2018) is a history of House Targaryen, and HBO's prequel House of the Dragon began in 2022.

For collectors. The British first edition of A Game of Thrones had a printing of only 1,500 copies, against several thousand for the American edition, which makes the UK Voyager hardback the scarcer of the two. Bantam printed copies early so they could be handed out at the June 1996 American Booksellers Association convention.