R.J. Barker is a British fantasy author, a softly-spoken Yorkshireman with flowing locks, as his official bio has it, who lives in Leeds with his wife and son and has become one of the most distinctive voices in modern epic fantasy.
His debut trilogy, The Wounded Kingdom, beginning with Age of Assassins, introduced the crippled assassin Girton Club-Foot and earned him a David Gemmell Award nomination, but it was The Bone Ships that established him fully. The launch of the Tide Child trilogy is set in the Hundred Isles, where for generations ships of war have been built from the bones of ancient dragons, and when the first living dragon in centuries is spotted in far-off waters, whoever catches it will win not only glory but the war.
Told through a crew of the condemned aboard the black ship Tide Child, under the formidable Lucky Meas, it drew comparisons to Patrick O'Brian's richly detailed sagas of seamanship and won the British Fantasy Society's Robert Holdstock Award for Best Novel in 2020. Adrian Tchaikovsky called its world one of the most interesting and original in years.
Its sequels, Call of the Bone Ships and The Bone Ship's Wake, completed the trilogy, and he has since begun the Forsaken trilogy with Gods of the Wyrdwood.
