George R. R. Martin

In 2005, Lev Grossman of Time called Martin ‘the American Tolkien’. In 2011, he was included in the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world.

George R. R. Martin began selling monster stories to neighbourhood kids for pennies at a very early age. At secondary school he became a comic book fan and collector and began writing for amateur fan magazines. His first professionally published work was the short story The Hero in 1970, which was published in Galaxy magazine in February 1971. Also in 1970, he graduated with a bachelor's degree in journalism from the elite Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. A year later, he completed his master's degree.

Martin quickly made a name for himself in the science fiction scene as an author of mostly melancholic material. Important stories from his early phase include With Morning comes Mistfall, his first story, which was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Awards, And Seven Times Never Kill Man, A Tower of Ashes and A Song for Lya, with which he won his first Hugo.

From 1973 to 1976, he organised several chess tournaments for the Continental Chess Association. From 1976, George Martin taught journalism for two years at Clark College in Dubuque, Iowa. During this time, he only wrote on the side, which was not to change until 1979. This year also saw the end of his childless marriage to Gale Burnick, which he had entered into in 1975.

After publishing his first novels, he tried his hand in and for the US film industry from 1986 and became a screenwriter for Twilight Zone on CBS Television. In 1987, he wrote scripts for the successful programme Beauty and the Beast, which he also produced from 1988. Some of the scripts were written in collaboration with Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa. However, he had little success as executive producer and writer for Doorways in 1992. Those responsible often forced him to rewrite the plots he had conceived, which frustrated him. Between 1987 and 1993, as editor and co-author, he oversaw the majority of the individual Wild Cards books (a shared-world series by various authors with strong echoes of the superhero genre).

In 1996, the first volume of his highly acclaimed fantasy epic A Song of Ice and Fire (originally three, then six and now seven novels) was published. In 2011, Martin completed the fifth volume, which reached number one on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists shortly after its publication. Due to their enormous scope, the books in the series are divided into several volumes per book in many countries (two in Germany). The HBO television series Game of Thrones, which is based on the book series, was broadcast from 2011 to 2019.

Martin is a fan of castles; when he spent four weeks in Germany in 2000, he visited numerous places with very old buildings, including Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Nördlingen and Neuschwanstein Castle, and is a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), of which he was South-Central Regional Director from 1977 to 1979 and Vice President from 1996 to 1998. He is also a member of the Horror Writers of America (HWA) and the Writers' Guild of America.

On 15 February 2011, Martin married his long-time girlfriend Parris McBride. The wedding took place on a small scale at Martin's home in New Mexico.

In 2019, his participation in the development of the video game Elden Ring was announced, for which he received the Nebula Award 2023 together with Hidetaka Miyazaki.