I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. What started with stories in school notebooks eventually led me through journalism, radio, television, and back to the kind of writing I had always loved most: fiction.
I still have the notebook containing my first longer piece of fiction, written when I was in primary school. In high school, I wrote constantly — prose, poetry, articles for the school paper — and eventually ended up studying Hungarian literature at university. Along the way, I also read an unreasonable amount of science fiction and fantasy.
University was a time of trying everything. I discovered radio, played with different forms of writing, and after graduating, quite by accident, started writing for a magazine focused mainly on business and culture. From there I found my way into television, where I stayed for the next six years. But I never stopped writing. Over the years I worked on everything from entertainment and celebrity stories to public affairs and specialist journalism.
For a long time, though, writing a novel felt like something other people were good enough to do. I didn’t think I was. Eventually, passion — and a little more faith in myself — won. These days I believe a thought doesn’t have to be perfect before you put it on the page. You just have to care about what you’re creating, keep writing, and be willing to learn as you go.
For me, reading — and fantasy in particular — has always meant freedom. It allowed me to go anywhere in my imagination and explore worlds I had never even known how to imagine before. That feeling has never left me. And it is one of the reasons I write: so that you, dear reader, might find that same sense of freedom between the pages, if only for a little while.
Finn Thale 