Rob J. Hayes

I mostly write Dark Epic Fantasy, but I also like to switch up genres a lot. My series The War Eternal for example definitely fits that, but my series Titan Hoppers is very much Space Opera Science Fantasy.

I'm a character driven writer first and foremost. I love to dig deep into a character's perspective, and I feel it's their journey through the overarching plot that really grabs readers.

I was born in Britain and it definitely influenced my humour. I'm a big fan of sprinkling bits of humour within my books, and if you've ever watched classic comedy shows like Black Adder or Red Dwarf, you'll no doubt see the influences right away.

Voracious! I still remember the first fantasy book I ever read. My mother borrowed The Dark Portal by Robin Jarvis from the library and I devoured it in days. Our library didn't stock the rest of the series, so I had to beg her to buy them for me. I used to plow through chunky books in a week or so at most.

I'm always torn between Robin Hobb and Mark Lawrence. No one does characters and emotion quite like Hobb. With just a couple of paragraphs, she can make me feel like I've known a character all my life, or hate them from the depths of my soul. But I always love Lawrence's philosophical style of writing, his way of laying the world bare with a perfect metaphor is something I would love to be able to do.

The toughest of all questions... Robin Hobb, Mark Lawrence, Chris Wooding, Maggie Furey, Tamsyn Muir

My most gifted or loaned out book is probably Assassin's Apprentice. I'm actually on my third copy of that book because they keep 'going missing' after I loan them.

Eskara Helsene from The War Eternal. For a number of reasons really, but I suppose the most important would be that I've dealt with depression for a large period of my life. I just didn't realize it was depression for most of that time. It wasn't until I wrote Eska and put a lot of the chronic depression into her that I realized what I had been dealing with for so long. And like me, she fights through it even when it feels too great to bear.

That really is an impossible question. The Heresy Within was my first (published) book and, flawed though it is, it means so much to me. Never Die was a BLAST to write and quite literally saved me when I thought I had lost the ability to tell a story. Along the Razor's Edge introduced Eska to the world, and she means more to me than any other character I've ever written. Herald is my first time writing my favourite genre, true EPIC Fantasy, and I love it for that.

So don't make me choose!

I have an office in my house. It's a large room with a lovely south facing window that gets lots of light. My desk sits in the corner next to the window and I have my bookshelves behind me. I work on a nice wooden desk, with two monitors set up. And behind me, I can hear the soft (or sometimes very loud) snoring of a sleepy Potato (she's actually a beagle).

Oooh, a nice comfy chair with a big of a recline to it. A crackling fire beside me, and rain outside, but no other noise. And a glass of whiskey by my side.