Browsing all articles tagged with The Broken Empire.
Mark Lawrence Interview – The Girl and the Stars
Today we are very happy to have back Mark Lawrence! Lawrence is the author of multiple bestselling series: The Broken Empire, The Red Queen’s War, The Book of the Ancestor, Impossible Times trilogy,and his new upcoming trilogy: Book of the Ice. Again, thank you Mr. Lawrence for agreeing to another interview with Fantasy-Faction. What influenced […]
Mark Lawrence Interview – Red Sister (2016)
Mark Lawrence’s first published work Prince of Thorns attracted some controversy on its release and Mark has been as robust as he is generous in his online engagement with fans, fellow writers and critics. There is a rare gift and a sharp wit to all his writing such that even his most ardent critics would […]
Monthly Short Story Winner: Broken Empire FanFic
The challenge this month was to write fanfiction, which means the story should be set in an already existing fantastical universe. Writers could choose from the following book series as the setting for their story: Pratchett’s Discworld, Rowling’s Harry Potter, Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Lawrence’s Broken Empire, Lynch’s Gentleman […]
The Liar’s Key Cover Reveal
When your most recent novel has done enough to pick up both the David Gemmell Legend Award (prose) and the David Gemmell Ravenheart Award (Cover Art), you are inevitably going to have readers waiting with bated breath for your subsequent work. Certainly, when Mark Lawrence announced that he was going to continue writing books in the […]
Is It Better To Be A Blank Slate Or To Have Some Character?
In a recent blog post, Mark Lawrence commented on the trade offs of creating a blank slate character versus a more defined, idiosyncratic character. In the post (and I highly recommend reading the entire thing), Mark writes that for a number of fantasy readers, plot is of primary importance. For such readers, a vanilla protagonist […]
Monthly Short Story Winner: Fanfic
We’ve been getting such good feedback for the short stories our members have submitted in our Monthly Short Story Competition that we have decided to post them on the main site at a rate of about one a fortnight. Today we will be looking at the winner from our February 2014 contest. If a book […]
Emperor of Thorns by Mark Lawrence


In my opinion, Mark Lawrence is one of the finest writers of fantasy around today. His ability to craft beautiful, fluent prose is matched only by the likes of Patrick Rothfuss and Robin Hobb, and I’d argue that his writing is often even deeper and more powerful than either of them. What Mark has is […]
The Broken Empire Trilogy: The Allure of Jorg
The following is a guest post I wrote last year for Harper Voyager on the allure of Mark Lawrence’s protagonist Jorg Ancrath. Although most of my references were to the first book, I think the reasons I find Jorg such an intriguing character held strong during the second book and, as a result, I found […]
King of Thorns by Mark Lawrence


This review contains spoilers for book one. If you haven’t read Prince of Thorns yet, then read this review with caution. You can read Fantasy-Faction’s review of Prince of Thorns here. You will also find that the review is split into three sections. A reflection on Prince of Thorns, a recap of book one, and […]
Mark Lawrence Interview – Prince of Thorns
Disturbing, beautiful, chaotic, poetic, haunting, exhilarating… Believe it or not these are all words I would use to describe a single book: Prince of Thorns. Prince of Thorns is the debut novel of British author Mark Lawrence; a book I reviewed earlier this year. Looking back on the book now, a few months later, I […]
Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence


Disturbing, Beautiful, Chaotic, Poetic, Haunting, Exhilarating… Believe it or not, these are all words I would use to describe a single book. Prince of Thorns is the debut novel of British author Mark Lawrence. “Before the thorns taught me their sharp lessons and bled weakness from me I had but one brother, and I loved […]