George Raymond Richard Martin, born in 1948 in Bayonne, New Jersey, and often referred to as GRRM, is an American author and screenwriter of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He sold his first stories while still in college and earned degrees in journalism before beginning his writing career in earnest in the 1970s.
His early work spanned science fiction and horror, including the novel Dying of the Light and the acclaimed vampire novel Fevre Dream, and won him several Hugo and Nebula Awards for shorter fiction. Critics described his work as dark and cynical, marked by a strong sense of melancholy and characters who struggle to stay idealistic in a ruthless world.
In the late 1980s and 1990s Martin worked extensively in television, writing for series including The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast, an experience that sharpened his sense of character and structure even as it frustrated his ambitions for stories too large for the screen.
He is best known for A Song of Ice and Fire, his sprawling epic fantasy series begun with A Game of Thrones in 1996. Told through many viewpoint characters across the warring continents of Westeros and Essos, it is celebrated for its moral complexity, political intrigue, and willingness to let beloved characters fall.
The series became a global phenomenon when adapted by HBO as Game of Thrones, one of the most popular television series ever made. Martin has also edited the long-running Wild Cards shared-universe anthologies and continues to write within the world of Westeros through companion histories and related works.
