Evan Winter

The Rage of Dragons was self-published in 2017 and picked up by Orbit after readers pushed it, and it is a revenge story built on a caste system where a gift-less boy trains to kill the man who killed his father.

Winter drew on Xhosa history and language rather than on European models, and the military training sections are relentless in a way that reads as deliberate rather than indulgent.

He grew up between England, South Africa and Canada, and has said it came from wanting an epic fantasy where the hero looked like him.