James Logan was born in Surrey, England, where he grew up on a healthy diet of classic 1980s cartoons and Commodore 64 computer games. Books were an early love as well, with Sheila McCullough’s Puddle Lane and Tim and the Hidden People series instilling an early love of the fantastical.
The impulse purchase of Ian Livingstone’s Return to Firetop Mountain started an obsession with Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and heroic fantasy. A passion for Warhammer soon followed, which led to him being thrown out of an English lesson for reading a Space Wolves codex book (with the furious teacher describing it as ‘perverted rubbish’).
Undaunted, James continued to play Warhammer and read fantasy novels, with The Sword of Shannara acting as a gateway to the world of adult epic fantasy. After devouring the works of Terry Brooks, Raymond E. Feist and Robert Jordan, he decided – with the ironclad belief only teenagers possess – that he would write his own fantasy novel, and it would be brilliant.
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.
The fledgling effort, pompously titled The Flames of Hope, was an exuberant take on classic fantasy tropes (if you were being generous) or a shameless rip-off of several bestselling books (if you weren’t). The fledgling manuscript was put out of its misery after just a few chapters. Its many successors – mayfly manuscripts all – didn’t fair any better, but it didn’t matter. James was hooked.
However, the writing would have to wait. Rock music was James’s main passion in his teenage years, and he dreamed of being a professional musician (or, to put it more truthfully, a rock star). Friday nights were spent jamming with his band (which went through a series of names, all of them terrible). Demos were recorded and gigs were played (including one notable show where the band managed to get kicked out by a furious landlord before the gig had even started). A huge amount of fun was had, but eventually rock ‘n’ roll dreams gave way to the dawning reality that instead of rocking in the free world, James was probably going to have to go to university.
So go to university he did. First an undergraduate degree in Cardiff, then a postgraduate degree in Manchester. A series of dull admin jobs followed. It was around this time – circa 2006 – that James rediscovered his love of writing. Soon it grew from a passion to a dream, and an escape from tedious reality. Eventually, realising he was either going to be fired or completely lose his mind (and it was only a question as to which happened first), James quit his job and moved to London to take a role in publishing, figuring that editing fantasy books was the next best thing to actually writing them.
However, the ambition to write remained. In January 2015 he started typing the first words of the book that would become The Silverblood Promise, and in February 2023 the novel was sold in a three-book deal to Anne C. Perry at Arcadia, an imprint of Quercus. Later that year North American rights were sold at auction to Tor Books.
James Logan 