Andrzej Sapkowski

A short story sent to a Polish magazine competition in 1986 took third prize and started everything. Andrzej Sapkowski, born in Łódź on 21 June 1948, had studied economics and was selling for a foreign trade firm when Fantastyka printed The Witcher. Geralt of Rivia, a mutant monster hunter for hire who keeps finding that the monsters are the smaller problem, carried the collections The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny before the novels took over: Blood of Elves (1994), The Time of Contempt (1995), Baptism of Fire (1996), The Tower of the Swallow (1997) and The Lady of the Lake (1999). Season of Storms, published in 2013, doubles back to the earlier period. Danusia Stok and David French translated the books into English for Gollancz. Sales pass 30 million copies in 37 languages. He received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2016, and settled a long royalties dispute with the game studio CD Projekt in December 2019.