George R. R. Martin

Fiction Writer

• Born: September 20, 1948
• Place of Birth: Bayonne, New Jersey

Biography

George Raymond Richard Martin was born in 1948 in Bayonne, New Jersey, the son of Raymond Martin, a longshoreman, and Margaret (Brady) Martin, an employee at a lingerie factory. An early writer, he began contributing stories to fan magazines when he was a teenager. He received a BSJ, summa cum laude, from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in 1970, and an MSJ there in 1971. A conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, he worked for VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) as communications coordinator for the Cook County Legal Assistance Foundation in Chicago, Illinois, from 1972 to 1974.

Three years after his first professional sale, Martin won the 1975 Hugo Award for best novella for A Song for Lya, the story of an alien religion that converts humans with deadly results. In 1975, he married Gail Burnick; they divorced in 1979. He was an instructor in journalism at Clarke College in Dubuque, Iowa, from 1976 to 1978, and writer-in-residence there from 1978 to 1979. After that, he wrote full time.

In 1980, he won three major awards: the Hugo and Nebula Awards for the novelette “Sandkings,” a science-fiction horror story, and the Hugo Award for short story for “The Way of Cross and Dragon,” about Catholicism in the far future. Two of his notable early novels are Fevre Dream, about vampires on the Mississippi River in nineteenth century America, and The Armageddon Rag, a fantasy inspired by the early demise of the countercultural impulses that swept across America in the 1960s and 1970s. In the late 1980s Martin worked in television for CBS, initially as story editor for the first resurrection of The Twilight Zone, producing several memorable teleplays, and from 1987 to 1990 as writer, executive story consultant, and producer for the cult favorite Beauty and the Beast.

Martin’s dissatisfaction with the length restrictions involved in producing scripts for both the small and large screen led him to publish A Game of Thrones in 1996, the first novel in the epic fantasy series A Song of Fire and Ice. The second book, A Clash of Kings, followed in 1999. Projected to run to seven volumes, Martin had hoped to produce a volume every year or two, but the five-year gap between the third and fourth books, A Storm of Swords (2000) and A Feast for Crows (2005), respectively, showed that the length of the novels precluded any such speed of production. The fifth book in the series, A Dance with Dragons was published in 2011, the same year that the wildly popular HBO television series based on the books, Game of Thrones started to air. Martin served as a coexecutive producer on sixty-seven of the series' seventy-three episodes from 2011 to 2019, and was also credited as a writer for the series. The release of the sixth book, The Winds of Winter, was projected for spring 2016 to coincide with the beginning of the sixth season of the television series, but the book was not finished in time and its release was delayed multiple times. The show ended in 2019, before the book series was completed.

In 2018, Martin's 1980 novella Nightflyers was adapted as a television series. Martin's 2018 work Fire & Blood was adapted into a critically successful television series, House of the Dragon. The series premiered on HBO in August 2022 and was quickly renewed for both a second and third season. That same year, it was announced that several other spinoffs based on Martin's other works were in early development. In 2024, the writer announced that he continued to struggle with The Winds of Winter.

Martin’s awards include the 1986 Nebula Award for best novelette for Portraits of His Children; the 1988 Bram Stoker Award for The Pear-Shaped Man; the 1989 World Fantasy Award for best novella for The Skin Trade; the 1997 Hugo Award for best novella for Blood of the Dragon; and six Locus Awards. Martin also edited and wrote works in the Wild Cards series, set on an Earth in which superheroes have been created. While Martin was never a particularly prolific writer, his works, whether strikingly inventive or variations on an old theme (such as Fevre Dream), have been of a consistently high quality and originality. Because of the success of the Game of Thrones book and television series, Martin has become one of the most popular and recognizable writers in popular American fiction. In 2023, Martin won a Nebula Award for Best Game Writing for his work on the popular game Elden Ring (2022).

Martin married his partner of over thirty years, Parris McBride, in 2011. The couple lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Bibliography

Cusumano, Katherine. "How Game of Thrones Author George R. R. Martin's Own Life Inspired A Song of Ice & Fire." Bustle. Bustle.com, 28 Jan. 2016. Web. 30 Mar. 2016.

"Life and Times." George R. R. Martin. George R. R. Martin, 2016. Web. 30 Mar. 2016.

"George R. R. Martin." Bio. A&E Television Networks, n.d. Web. 30 Mar. 2016.

"George R.R. Martin Continues to Make Little Progress on The Winds of Winter." Gizmodo, 10 Sept. 2024, gizmodo.com/george-r-r-martin-continues-to-make-little-progress-on-the-winds-of-winter-2000497073. Accessed 16 Oct. 2024.