The Forging of the Shadows

Oliver Johnson (1957- )

Oliver Johnson was born in Paris in 1957 but never quite grasped the language before moving to the wilds of East Anglia. There he grew up in a crumbling Regency mansion next to a dismal bogland not dissimilar to the one in Great Expectations. Left to his own devices for days on end he first got hooked on books and then, at Oxford University, on role-playing games. He has spent the last thirty years as a publisher, novelist and games designer. He is the co-author, with Dave Morris, of the ground-breaking role-playing game, Dragon Warriors, wrote two of the Golden Dragon Game Books, The Lord of Shadow Keep and The Curse of the Pharaoh, and several other games and tie-in books. He is the author of the adult Ligthbringer trilogy, a dark, epic fantasy praised by David Gemmell as 'hauntingly atmospheric and utterly compelling... this is red-blooded fantasy writing at its best. Great heroes, terrible enemies, powerful magic...'. The three books (The Forging of the Shadows, The Nations of the Night and The Last Star at Dawn) are available as eBooks through the Gollancz SF Gateway and at the Kindle Store. He is currently a commissioning editor at Hodder and Stoughton where he is in charge of the Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror list. He occasionally writes for the Hodderscape blog. In 2014 he was a judge for The World Fantasy Awards. He lives in Clapham with his family and two temperamental cats but often dreams of the mudbanks, dykes and mists of his native Suffolk.