About

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Editors

Marc Aplin

Marc Aplin is founder and Overlord of Fantasy-Faction.

He devours about a novel a week, which he fits around training mixed martial artists for fights in cages. When he isn’t reading or training he likes to spend time with his girlfriend, Nikki, his dog, Poppy, and his dragon, Dragon.

Marc is always happy to hear from fans, authors and publishers, so, if you have any questions, drop him an email at: Marc [at] Fantasy-Faction.com or you can follow him on Twitter @FantasyFaction.

Jennie Ivins

Jennie Ivins is the Editor of Fantasy-Faction.

She lives with her math loving husband and their three autistic boys (one set of twins & one singleton). In-between her online life and being a stay-at-home mom, she is writing her first fantasy series.

She also enjoys photography, art, cooking, computers, science, history, and anything else shiny that happens across her field of vision.

If you’d like to reach Jennie, your best bet is Twitter where she is Autumn2May.

Assistant Editor

G R Matthews

After studying for a Diploma in Creative Writing, G R Matthews taught the subject at A Level and holds a BSc (Hons) in Geography. Currently working in education with a focus on Child Protection and Safeguarding, he finds time to write in the evenings between battles to get his children to go to bed and the desire to binge watch Eureka on Netflix. He has also studied (been hit a lot) Judo, Kung fu, Wing Chun and Kickboxing – and is not particularly skilled in any of them (hence the being hit a lot).

A D&D enthusiast, G R Matthews prefers the rogue (stabby stabby… who me?) as it suits his imagination and allows him to hide from all the things that go (accidently) wrong during a dungeon crawl… (and no one can prove I set fire to that town… it was only a little fire, honest!). As a self-taught guitarist the best that can be said is that at least he doesn’t sing along to the songs (all the time) and the few thousand, over the years, who’ve heard him play (and sing) are mostly fine (some, to be fair, are still in recovery, but we wish them well).

If you would like to contact G R Matthews you can find him on Twitter @G_R_Matthews or use his contact form here.

About Us

Fantasy-Faction began as Marc Aplin’s way to geek out about the fantasy books he’d discovered way back in 2010. His first adventure into the world of fantasy was The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks. He could not believe that a book could put you through so many emotional states and have you care so deeply about characters, epic stories, and vividness of the non-existent.

He next picked up Peter V. Brett’s The Painted Man due to the similar cover, and once again, he flew through the book and was stunned by all the same things. He realized that the feelings fantasy novels could give you and the places they could take you weren’t exclusive to one or two authors, but were provided by all good work within the genre.

But experiencing these feelings alone was not satisfying enough. He wanted to share them with other people. The grin that you take on as you read about a character as cool as Durzo Blint. The pain in your heart as Scott Lynch kills some of your favourite characters. The jaw dropping moments you have whilst reading prose as beautiful and poetic as Mark Lawrence’s. The suspense you feel as you wait for the thirteenth book in a series to arrive. The mob-mentality you become a part of as you demand George R. R. Martin hurries up and finishes ASOI&F or while you tell the rest of those ungrateful gits to shut up and let him take his time…he wanted to share it all.

In November 2010 he started this website to encourage people to read what we, our staff members and editors, consider good books capable of giving readers the feelings discussed above and to investigate the genre in an academic and enjoyable way through articles. Our job is to help readers find which books will rock their world through reviews and author interviews. The articles are a way of investigating how this awesomeness is achieved or how, as an author, you may achieve the same effects. We have never had an interest in telling readers, “This book didn’t do anything for me.” There are plenty of other sites that do that.

Why the name Fantasy-Faction? A faction is basically a grouping of like-minded individuals. Five years later our faction is part army, part family, and all lovers of fantasy books. We are now one of the largest fantasy communities on the web and it’s all thanks to our amazing contributors and our loyal Factioners.

In addition to an incredible amount of sustained hits, we’ve held Fantasy-Faction events in London’s top bookshops, been named Reddit’s Fantasy Site of the Year, were nominated for the British Fantasy Award (twice), the World Fantasy Award, and were the only genre site to reach the Goodreads Independent Blogger Award finals.

We’ve also published The Fantasy-Faction Anthology (US, UK). A short story collection to celebrate the fantasy genre’s amazing diversity, which was written by a combination of genre giants and previously unpublished authors. In the future we hope to publish more books, have a yearly fantasy award, many more Fantasy-Faction events, and even a convention!

So for those of you who’ve stuck by us since the beginning and those of you who are just joining us, thank you! We couldn’t have asked for a better group of people to share our love of fantasy with!