INTERVIEW: Ed McDonald
Last Updated on January 19, 2025
Ed McDonald is a UK-based fantasy author known for his contributions to the dark fantasy and grimdark genres. His books often explore morally ambiguous themes, delving into complex issues of morality, characters, and corruption. At the same time he weaves in exciting action sequences and pacing. He is particularly acclaimed for his Raven’s Mark series and The Redwinter Chronicles. The final instalment of this trilogy, titled Witch Queen of Redwinter, was released in November 2024. Ed was kind enough to take the time to discuss the significant book that shaped his identity as an author.
[GdM] What novel helped you become who you are? And how?
[EM] “Do not lie, cheat or steal. These things are for lesser men. Protect the weak against the evil strong and never allow thoughts of gain to lead you into the pursuit of evil.” – from the Iron Code of Druss.
Not every book must shine as an example across all areas of writing to speak to you in a particular way, and this one certainly doesn’t. I received it in a Christmas stocking aged 13 and is my annual summer re-read. Not a book that would win awards for its prose, it was written in 1984, so it might cause a fair bit of pearl clutching in its phrasing or representation at times, but this book carries such a powerful message, it is the book that more than any lecture could try to convey, any podcast host could argue, any PhD writing revisionist could conjure, is the book that taught me what it means to be a man. This book, of course, is Legend by David Gemmell. The message in this novel about the end of life and giving our fleeting existence meaning is that you don’t have to have good feelings. You don’t have to have always been a paladin. You can feel selfish, and you can be a man of violence. But it’s what you do with that power that matters, and you must judge yourself more harshly than anyone else. That’s the impact it had on me. This novel gave me my philosophy, but more than that, it told me what kind of man I should be. Those claiming that masculinity has been taken from us in the 21st century never understood what being a man meant in the first place. David Gemmell did, and as a teenager, he showed me here. It means using the privileges you’ve been given, the skills you acquired, to stand for those who don’t have them, even in the face odds that cannot be beaten. It’s knowing you’ll lose and doing the right thing anyway.
[GdM] Certainly high praise and much deserved for this. I hear this a lot about how Gemmell was the writer that showed those new to the genre the power that fiction had; not everything has to be fanciful and devoid of meaning in SFF. Much of the reading I have done in fiction has had a greater impact on who I am than any non-fiction book ever did. Where did you go from there? And do you use the lessons from Gemmell in how you write characters?
Author Ed McDonald
[EM] I think that fiction is always in a bind: it is not real, and therefore cannot show us anything true, but at the same time it can show us who we are, who we want to be, and the things that resonate truly ring out into our psyche. In writing characters, I rarely (if ever) am aware of the influence that’s causing me to write them at any given moment, and if I was, I’d probably shy from writing that way. I just sit and write, and the characters appear. I rarely have any conscious thought about writing at all—for me it’s more done by feeling than by design. And yet, I think that in everything I write you’ll find threads of Gemmell’s messages permeating through. The siege that cannot be won; the impossible last stands; the one-man-against-all-odds; and perhaps most of all, my protagonists are always possessed of a singular will not to give in, to fight on, to never say die, never surrender.
[GdM] Aside from Gemmell, are there any current works or authors you admire and why? What is it about their works and authors that make them stand for you?
[EM] I have ever been, and will ever be, in awe of Robin Hobb, whose ability to create character depth is absolutely second to none. But if we’re talking current and mind-blowing, Andy Weir’s Project: Hail Mary is very hard to match. I really like what Tamsyn Muir does with prose and dialect in Gideon the Ninth, it’s funny, fresh and irreverent. These days I read a lot of spy thrillers and most recently I enjoyed Agent Seventeen by John Brownlow.
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