Bio

Nathan Tudor has researched ancient religion at Oxford, traveled the seven continents, and mastered the art of speaking in the third person. His debut novel The Empire’s Lion tells an epic story filled with action, identity, and the struggle to do what is right in an upside-down world.

Despite the best efforts of several well-meaning but misguided voices to convince him what constitutes “real literature” (structurally, we might call these the antagonists), Nathan always loved fantasy stories. Growing up on J.R.R. Tolkien and ancient mythology, he understood at a deep, intuitive level that these stories mattered—perhaps in a cosmic sense (they certainly spoke about cosmic matters, at least).

As he read wider and deeper, he recognized time and again how fantasy delves to the mythic heart of the human imagination, recapturing and retelling the same truths, ideals, and desires that animate our most foundational stories—from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Iliad to Paradise Lost to Lord of the Rings. Nathan strives to tell stories that partake of the archetypal and symbolic visions that have always inspired and instructed the human spirit.

Nathan’s academic career in religious studies (with a particular focus on the ancient Near East and Greco-Roman antiquity) informs much of his fiction. The high point of his studies was researching an obscure Dead Sea Scrolls text at the University of Oxford, and though he is now on the Pacific coast, the ideas sparked by that project continue to manifest in his writing.

His most prominent influences include Guy Gavriel Kay, Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson, Steven Erikson, and Gene Wolfe. Beyond the realms of fantasy, G.K. Chesterton, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mircea Eliade, William Blake, and Steven Pressfield—just to name a few—have all left their mark.

When he’s not writing or reading, Nathan can be found debating matters of no particular consequence with his friends, falling down research rabbit holes, and fiddling with a hand-crank coffee grinder that’s been stuck for the last few months.

Allegations that he hired an alchemist to give him the tread of a cat and the ears of a fox are categorically false.