Graham McNeill

After writing a story in primary school about a giant octopus smashing up a boat, Graham realised that making stuff up was easier (and a lot more fun) than reality and decided at an early age that he was either going to be a binman or a writer. Fortunately, a life on the bins wasn’t on the cards and, after escaping a stint as a building surveyor in Glasgow, he headed south in 2000 to join Games Workshop’s Games Development Team. Here he worked on projects such as the Tau, Necrons, Witch Hunters, Space Marines and Black Templars codexes for Warhammer 40,000, Conquest of the New World and The Empire for Warhammer, and The Two Towers for The Lord of the Rings. As well as all this, he was involved in running Studio campaigns and collecting the odd toy soldier. Between populating the various Warhammer universes with fiends and heroes, he’s written a host of short stories for the Black Library and close to thirty novels for a number of publishers. Graham left Games Workshop in the summer of 2006 and spent the next nine years working as a full-time freelancer, spending most of his days locked in a tiny office (or tea shoppe) and dreaming up new and interesting ways to put his characters through hell on the pages of his novels, short stories and background books. Since leaving Games Workshop, he’s ventured far and wide, continuing to cause havoc in the worlds of Warhammer as well as those of Blizzard entertainment’s Starcraft universe and travelling back in time to the 1920s to unleash eldritch horror in a trilogy of books set in the Lovecraftian vein of terror that is Arkham Horror. His Horus Heresy novel, A Thousand Sons, was a New York Times bestseller, and Empire, the second novel in the Sigmar trilogy, won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award for best fantasy novel. Graham left the rain-swept shores of fair Britannia in the summer of 2015 to take gainful employment with a promising band of plucky video game entrepreneurs named Riot Games in Los Angeles, where he works as a Principal Narrative Writer in the cut and thrust of the Narrative Discipline.