George R.R. Martin

George R. R. Martin was born on 20 September 1948 in Bayonne, New Jersey, in a federal housing project by the docks, the son of a longshoreman. He spent his childhood reading Marvel comics and writing to their letters pages. Roughly sixty years later, an HBO adaptation of his books was employing several hundred people in Northern Ireland and pulling in audiences of twenty million an episode.

The route between those two points involved chess tournaments, a novel that nearly finished him and a decade of writing television he couldn't afford to film.

Chess tournaments and a career-ending flop

He studied journalism at Northwestern University, graduating in 1970 and taking a master's the following year. He registered as a conscientious objector rather than fight in Vietnam and did his alternative service with a legal aid outfit in Chicago.

His first story sold in 1970, when he was twenty-one, and ran in 'Galaxy' in February 1971. Since short fiction didn't pay the rent, he spent three years running chess tournaments for the Continental Chess Association during the boom that followed Bobby Fischer's world title, then taught journalism at a small college in Iowa.

The novels came next: 'Dying of the Light' (1977) and 'Fevre Dream' (1982), a vampire story set on Mississippi steamboats. Then 'The Armageddon Rag' (1983) sold so badly that it almost ended his career as a novelist. He seriously considered going into real estate.

He had been collecting science fiction prizes along the way, several Hugos and several Nebulas. What rescued him, though, was the 1987 film of his novella 'Nightflyers', a horror story set on a spaceship. It flopped, but it got him into television, and he has said that everything he has written since exists largely because of it. The story came back as a Syfy series, NightFlyers, in 2018.

Ten years writing for television

Hollywood treated him reasonably well. He joined the mid-eighties revival of 'The Twilight Zone' as a writer, then moved to 'Beauty and the Beast', the 1987 fantasy series with Ron Perlman and Linda Hamilton, where he rose to producer and wrote fourteen episodes.

It was also when he started editing 'Wild Cards', the shared-universe superhero anthology series he still runs four decades on, and which grew out of a role-playing game he ran with friends in Albuquerque.

What wore him down was money. Every time he wrote a battle or a castle, somebody told him to cut it. In 1991 he gave up, went back to prose and set out to write something deliberately impossible to film: every army, every dragon and as many characters as he felt like.

A Song of Ice and Fire

The result was 'A Game of Thrones' (1996), the first volume of a series he had planned as a trilogy and which now runs to seven projected books. 'A Clash of Kings' (1998), 'A Storm of Swords' (2000), 'A Feast for Crows' (2005) and 'A Dance with Dragons' (2011) followed.

His raw material wasn't only Tolkien. He raided the Wars of the Roses and Maurice Druon's 'The Accursed Kings', and built a world where good intentions save nobody and lead characters die when the plot says so. In 2005 'Time' magazine called him "the American Tolkien", and in 2011 it put him on its list of the hundred most influential people alive.

In 2018 he published 'Fire & Blood', a fake history of the Targaryen dynasty written in the voice of a maester. Nearly everything HBO has filmed since comes out of it.

Belfast, HBO and the show that overtook him

HBO bought the rights in 2007 and Game of Thrones premiered on 17 April 2011, adapted by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, with Sean Bean heading the first season's cast. Its home was the Paint Hall in Belfast, and the eight years it spent shooting across Northern Ireland rebuilt the local screen industry more or less single-handedly.

Martin was an executive producer and wrote one episode a season for the first four, including 'Blackwater'. From the fifth he stepped back to concentrate on the novels, which produced the odd situation that defines his career: the television series caught up with him and then passed him.

The writers finished the story from an outline he had given them. The 2019 ending set off one of the loudest collective sulks in television history, even as that final season broke Emmy records. By the time it finished, the show had won 59 Emmys, more than any other scripted series.

Then came House of the Dragon (2022), the prequel about the Targaryen civil war, whose third season ran from June to August 2026. His relationship with it has been prickly. In 2024 he posted a piece on his blog called "Beware the Butterflies", complaining about changes made by showrunner Ryan Condal, in particular cutting the child Prince Maelor, and took it down half an hour later.

He has been happier with A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the adaptation of his Dunk and Egg novellas that HBO launched on 18 January 2026 with Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell. HBO renewed it before the first episode had even aired, and a second season based on 'The Sworn Sword' is expected in the first half of 2027.

Santa Fe, wolves and the book that won't arrive

He has lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, since 1979. He married Gale Burnick in 1975 and they divorced four years later; he has been with Parris McBride since 1981 and married her in February 2011. They have no children.

He has been buying up his adopted city in pieces. In 2013 he rescued the Jean Cocteau Cinema, shut since 2006, in 2019 he opened a bookshop called Beastly Books next door, and in 2015 he put 2.7 million dollars into Meow Wolf, the art collective that turned a derelict bowling alley into one of the state's biggest attractions. He and McBride also fund a wolf sanctuary.

He still writes on an MS-DOS machine running WordStar, with no spellchecker and no internet, keeping a separate computer for email. In 2023 he joined the Authors Guild class action against OpenAI over the use of copyrighted books to train its models, a case a New York judge allowed to move forward in 2025.

Film work keeps arriving. March 2025 brought In the Lost Lands, Paul W.S. Anderson's version of a short story he wrote in 1982, with Milla Jovovich and Dave Bautista. He is also producing Elden Ring, the film Alex Garland is shooting for A24 from the video game whose backstory Martin wrote, due in March 2028.

He executive produces Dark Winds too, and turned up in the third season premiere playing chess in a jail cell opposite Robert Redford. The scene was his idea. Redford ad-libbed a dig about how long the books are taking, and it turned out to be his final performance: he died in September 2025. It wasn't Martin's first cameo either: he had already killed himself off in a cinema in Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!.

Which leaves the thing everybody actually wants to know. 'The Winds of Winter' stands at around 1,100 manuscript pages and fifteen years late, and in 2026 Martin admitted he has made no substantial progress since 2022. His publisher has had to deny more than once that it is finished. He turned 78 this month, and a great many readers are quietly doing the arithmetic.