Mark Lawrence was born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, to British parents but moved to the UK at the age of one. He went back to the US after taking a PhD in mathematics at Imperial College to work on a variety of research projects including the 'Star Wars' missile defence programme. Returning to the UK, he has worked mainly on image processing and decision/reasoning theory. He says he never had any ambition to be a writer so was very surprised when a half-hearted attempt to find an agent turned into a global publishing deal overnight. His first trilogy, The Broken Empire, has been universally acclaimed as a ground-breaking work of fantasy, and both The Liar's Key and The Wheel of Osheim have won the Gemmell Legend award for best fantasy novel. Mark is married, with four children, and lives in Bristol. Follow Mark on: Facebook: www.facebook.com/MarkLawrenceBooks Twitter: @mark__lawrence (please note: there are two underscores)
`An excellent writer' George R.R. Martin `Dark, passionate, tense, with a female hero anyone could relate to-I was utterly fascinated! This is no pretty, flowery tale, but one of vastly different people struggling to survive when a hostile government comes to power' #1 New York Times bestselling author Tamora Pierce `This is a book very distinct from everything that came before; what it has in common though is a narrative that pulls no punches, and characters that are beautifully, brokenly, repellently, cleverly human' Sci-Fi and Fantasy Reviews `I had never thought it was possible to find a greater character than the Emperor Jorg Ancrath. I had never even slightly considered that there might be a fantasy world out there toppling that of he Final Empire, and most definitely, I had never thought that I could love a book more than The Night Angel. But here we are' BookNest `Any other author is going to have to smack the ball way, way out of the park to top this read' Parmenion Books