Author who occasionally does other things
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,” Nathan always loved fantasy stories. Growing up on Tolkien and mythology, he understood at a deep, intuitive level that these stories mattered in a cosmic sense.
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 influences include: Gene Wolfe, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, GK Chesterton, Dostoevsky, Eliade, Blake, Nietzsche, Yukio Mishima, Euripides, Herman Hesse, Steven Pressfield.
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 striving to craft the perfect vodka martini.
Allegations that he hired an alchemist to give him the tread of a cat and the ears of a fox are categorically false.