About F. D. Lee

One of my earliest memories is of my mum reading ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’ to me, and my love of SFF grew from there.

I love comics, books, movies, television, films, theatre, RPGs, TTGs, and computer games – anything that will transport me to another world. I also enjoy studying and learning new things, and have a special interest in fandoms, community development, and education.

I have a BA (Hons) in Drama, Theatre, and Television, and I wrote my UG dissertation on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I later earned a Master’s in Applied Linguistics and a PhD in English Literature. My PhD focused on how narrative shapes belief formation, with a focus on female representation, tropes, and archetypes in fairy tales and high fantasy. What I learnt was very scary! Check out the Just World Theory and the Sleeper Effect if you want to know why…

 I write with what I learnt from my PhD in mind. I believe literature should reflect people as they are in real life: not simply ‘good’ or ‘evil’, but messy and complicated. As someone once said, ‘no one sees themselves as the villain’, and fiction provides us with a unique opportunity to develop empathy, criticality, and understanding. Which isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with a good hate-sink character! But, for me, an antagonist is always a better antagonist if you understand why they do what they do, and a protagonist is always a better protagonist if they’re imperfect.

I would have to say that Terry Pratchett is my number one, most favourite author ever, but I also enjoy Max Brooks, Grant Naylor, Stephen Baxter, Suzanne Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Joseph Heller, George Orwell, Jerome K. Jerome, P. G. Wodehouse, Martha Wells, Richard Osman, Jane Austen, Xiran Jay Zhao, MXTZ, Holly Black, N. K. Jemisin, James S. A. Corey, Kurt Vonnegut, Jilly Cooper, R. F. Kuang, Ida Keogh, Natasha Pulley, Kristen Painter, and Andy Weir.