Andy Darby grew up in Birmingham on a questionable diet of sword & sorcery, weird tales and heavy metal, and has never entirely recovered.

Over the years he’s been a singer in heavy metal bands, a martial artist, bodybuilder, American football player and spectacularly unsuccessful surfer. These days he lives on the north coast of Cornwall with his wife, assorted animals, too many books, and an imagination that refuses to behave itself.

When he isn’t designing things for a living, Andy writes grimdark, sword & sorcery, historical fantasy and bizarre stories populated by killers, heretics, monsters, mercenaries and people who really ought to know better.

He has a particular fondness for history’s darker corners, Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock, very loud guitars, sharp swords and stories in which the difference between the heroes and the villains is largely a matter of perspective.

His novel The Blade in the Angel’s Shadow combines Elizabethan intrigue, brutal swordplay, cosmic horror and the occasional extremely bad decision, and his anthology Sword Songs plunges into a brutal realm of dark sorcery and cosmic dread through a collection of grim tales where bloodthirsty deities, cursed warriors, and ancient horrors collide in a relentless struggle for survival.