George Raymond Martin (he adopted the confirmation name Richard at 13 years old) was born on September 20, 1948, in Bayonne, New Jersey, the son of longshoreman Raymond Collins Martin and Margaret Brady Martin. On his mother’s side his family used to be wealthy, and owned a successful construction business, but they lost it all in the Great Depression, something Martin was reminded about every day when he passed what used to be his family’s dock and house. It made him feel that even if they were poor, they came from greatness that had been taken away from them. He has two younger sisters, Darleen and Janet. His mother was of half Irish ancestry. He also acknowledges French, English, Welsh and German roots, which were confirmed on the television series Finding Your Roots. However, while he also believed he was a quarter Italian because of who he was told was his paternal grandfather, a DNA test on the show confirmed his Irish and other ancestries but excluded any Italian ancestry, showing instead he is approximately a quarter Ashkenazi Jewish.

The family first lived in a house on Broadway, belonging to Martin’s great-grandmother. In 1953, they moved to a federal housing project near the Bayonne docks. During Martin’s childhood, his world consisted predominantly of “First Street to Fifth Street”, between his grade school and his home; this limited world made him want to travel and experience other places, but the only way of doing so was through his imagination, and he became a voracious reader. Martin began writing and selling monster stories for pennies to other neighborhood children, dramatic readings included. He also wrote stories about a mythical kingdom populated by his pet turtles; the turtles died frequently in their toy castle, so he decided they were killing each other off in “sinister plots”. Martin had a habit of starting “endless stories” that he never completed, as they didn’t turn out as great as word on paper as he had imagined them in his head.

Martin attended Mary Jane Donohoe School and later Marist High School. While there he became an avid comic book fan, developing a strong interest in the superheroes being published by Marvel Comics, and later credited Stan Lee for being one of his greatest literary influences; “Maybe Stan Lee is the greatest literary influence on me, even more than Shakespeare or Tolkien.” A letter Martin wrote to the editor of Fantastic Four was printed in issue No. 20 (November 1963); it was the first of many sent, e.g., Fantastic Four #32, #34, and others. Fans who read his letters wrote him letters in turn, and through such contacts, Martin joined the fledgling comics fandom of the era, writing fiction for various fanzines; he bought the first ticket to the world’s first Comic-Con, held in New York in 1964. In 1965, Martin won comic fandom’s Alley Award for Best Fan Fiction for his prose superhero story “Powerman vs. The Blue Barrier”.

In 1970, Martin earned a B.S. in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois, graduating summa cum laude; he went on to complete his M.S. in Journalism in 1971, also from Medill. Eligible for the draft during the Vietnam War, to which he objected, Martin applied for and obtained conscientious objector status; he instead did alternative service work for two years (1972–1974) as a VISTA volunteer, attached to the Cook County Legal Assistance Foundation.

Martin began selling science fiction short stories professionally in 1970, at age 21. His first sale was “The Hero”, sold to Galaxy magazine and published in its February 1971 issue; other sales soon followed. His first story to be nominated for the Hugo Award and Nebula Awards was “With Morning Comes Mistfall”, published in 1973 in Analog magazine. In 1975 his story “…for a single yesterday” about a post-apocalyptic timetripper was selected for inclusion in Epoch, a science fiction anthology edited by Roger Elwood and Robert Silverberg. His first novel, Dying of the Light, was completed in 1976 right before he moved to Dubuque and published in 1977. That same year the enormous success of Star Wars had a huge impact on the publishing industry and science fiction, and he sold the novel for the same amount he would make in three years of teaching.

The short stories he was able to sell in his early 20s gave him some profit, but not enough to pay his bills, which prevented him from becoming the full-time writer he wanted to be. The need for a day job occurred simultaneously with the American chess craze which followed Bobby Fischer’s victory in the 1972 world chess championship. Martin’s own chess skills and experience allowed him to be hired as a tournament director for the Continental Chess Association that ran chess tournaments on the weekends. This gave him a sufficient income, and because the tournaments only ran on Saturdays and Sundays, it allowed him to work as a writer five days a week from 1973 to 1976. When the chess bubble subsequently burst and no longer provided an income, he had become much better established as a writer.

While attending an East Coast science fiction convention he met his first wife, Gale Burnick; they were married in 1975. The marriage ended in divorce in 1979, without issue, just before they were meant to move to Santa Fe together. Instead he settled there alone from December the same year till through September 1981, when what would be his longtime partner Parris McBride moved in with him. On February 15, 2011, Martin married Parris during a small ceremony at their Santa Fe home. On August 19, 2011, they held a larger wedding ceremony and reception at Renovation, the 69th World Science Fiction Convention.

Martin is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA); he served as the organization’s Southwest Regional Director from 1977 to 1979, and as its vice-president from 1996 to 1998. In 1976, for Kansas City’s MidAmeriCon, the 34th World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon), Martin and his friend and fellow writer-editor Gardner Dozois conceived of and organized the first Hugo Losers’ Party for the benefit of all past and present Hugo-losing writers on the evening following the convention’s Hugo Awards ceremony. Martin was nominated for two Hugos that year but lost both awards, for the novelette “…and Seven Times Never Kill Man” and the novella The Storms of Windhaven, co-written with Lisa Tuttle. Although Martin often writes fantasy or horror, a number of his earlier works are science fiction tales occurring in a loosely defined future history, known informally as “The Thousand Worlds” or “The Manrealm”.

While he enjoyed teaching, the sudden death of friend and fellow author Tom Reamy in late 1977 made Martin reevaluate his own life, and he eventually decided to try to become a full-time writer. When his wife graduated from Clarke in 1979, he resigned from his job, and being tired of the hard winters in Dubuque, they moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1979, which they had “fallen in love with” after a visit the year before on their way to the worldcon in Phoenix.

In 1982, Martin published a vampire novel titled Fevre Dream set in the 19th century on the Mississippi River. Unlike traditional vampire novels, in Fevre Dream vampires are not supernatural creatures, but are rather a different species related to humans created by evolution with superhuman powers. Critic Don D’Amassa has praised Fevre Dream for its strong 19th century atmosphere and wrote: “This is without question one of the greatest vampire novels of all time”. Martin followed up Fevre Dream with another horror novel, The Armageddon Rag (1983). The unexpected commercial failure of The Armageddon Rag “essentially destroyed my career as a novelist at the time”, he recalled, and made him consider going into real estate instead.

In 1984, the new editor of Baen Books, Betsy Mitchell, called Martin to ask him if he had considered doing a collection of Haviland Tuf adventures. Martin, who had several favorite series characters like Solomon Kane, Elric, Nicholas van Rijn and Magnus Ridolph, had made an attempt to create such a character on his own in the 1970s with his Tuf stories. He was interested, but was too occupied with the writing of his next book, the never-completed novel Black and White and Red All Over, which occupied most of his writing time the same year. But after the failure of The Armageddon Rag, all editors rejected his upcoming novel, and desperate for money, he accepted Mitchell’s offer and wrote some more Tuf stories which were collected in Tuf Voyaging, which sold well enough for Mitchell to suggest a sequel. Martin was willing and agreed to do it, but before he got started he got an offer from Hollywood, where producer Philip DeGuere Jr. wanted to adapt The Armageddon Rag into a film. The film adaptation did not happen, but they stayed in touch, and when DeGuere became the producer for the revival of The Twilight Zone, Martin was offered a job as a writer. Working for television paid a lot better than writing literature, so he decided to move to Hollywood to seek a new career. At first he worked as staff writer for the show, and then as an executive story consultant. After the CBS series was cancelled, Martin migrated over to the already-underway satirical science fiction series Max Headroom. He worked on scripts and created the show’s “Ped Xing” character. However, before his scripts could go into production, the ABC show was cancelled in the middle of its second season. Martin was hired as a writer-producer on the new dramatic fantasy series Beauty and the Beast; in 1989, he became the show’s co-supervising producer and wrote 14 of its episodes.

In 1987, Martin published a collection of short horror stories in Portraits of His Children. During this same period, Martin continued working in print media as a book-series editor, this time overseeing the development of the multi-author Wild Cards book series, which takes place in a shared universe in which a small slice of post–World War II humanity gains superpowers after the release of an alien-engineered virus; new titles are published in the ongoing series from Tor Books. In Second Person, Martin “gives a personal account of the close-knit role-playing game (RPG) culture that gave rise to his Wild Cards shared-world anthologies”. An important element in the creation of the multiple author series was a campaign of Chaosium’s role-playing game Superworld (1983) that Martin ran in Albuquerque. Admitting he became completely obsessed with the game, he stopped writing literature for most of 1983, which he refers to as his “lost year”, but his shrinking bank accounts made him realize he had to come up with something, and got the idea that perhaps the stories and characters created in Superworld could somehow become profitable. Martin’s own contributions to Wild Cards have included Thomas Tudbury, “The Great and Powerful Turtle”, a powerful psychokinetic whose flying “shell” consisted of an armored VW Beetle. As of June 2011, 21 Wild Cards volumes had been published in the series; earlier that same year, Martin signed the contract for the 22nd volume, Low Ball (2014), published by Tor Books. In early 2012, Martin signed another Tor contract for the 23rd Wild Cards volume, High Stakes, which was released in August 2016.

In 1991, Martin briefly returned to writing novels. He had grown frustrated that his TV pilots and screenplays were not getting made and that TV-related production limitations like budgets and episode lengths were forcing him to cut characters and trim battle scenes. This pushed Martin back towards writing books, where he did not have to worry about compromising his imagination. Admiring the works of J. R. R. Tolkien in his childhood, he wanted to write an epic fantasy, though he did not have any specific ideas.

His epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, was inspired by the Wars of the Roses, The Accursed Kings and Ivanhoe. Though Martin originally conceptualized it as being three volumes, it is currently slated to comprise seven. The first, A Game of Thrones, was published in 1996, followed by A Clash of Kings in 1998 and A Storm of Swords in 2000. In November 2005, A Feast for Crows, the fourth novel in this series, became The New York Times No. 1 Bestseller. The fifth book, A Dance with Dragons, was published July 12, 2011, and became an international bestseller, including achieving a No. 1 spot on the New York Times Bestseller List and many others; it remained on the New York Times list for 88 weeks. In 2012, A Dance With Dragons made the final ballot for science fiction and fantasy’s Hugo Award, World Fantasy Award, Locus Poll Award, and the British Fantasy Award; the novel went on to win the Locus Poll Award for Best Fantasy Novel. Two more novels are planned in the series: The Winds of Winter and the final volume A Dream of Spring. On April 25, 2018, Martin announced the release date of his new book, Fire & Blood, dealing with the history of House Targaryen, which was released on November 20, 2018.

In the mid-1970s, Martin met English professor George Guthridge from Dubuque, Iowa, at a science fiction convention in Milwaukee. Martin persuaded Guthridge (who later said that at that time he despised science fiction and fantasy) not only to give speculative fiction a second look, but to write in the field himself. Guthridge has since been a finalist for the Hugo Award and twice for the Nebula Award for science fiction and fantasy. In 1998, Guthridge and Janet Berliner won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in the Novel for their Children of the Dusk.

Martin is known for his regular attendance at science fiction conventions and comics conventions, and his accessibility to fans. In the early 1980s, critic and writer Thomas Disch identified Martin as a member of the “Labor Day Group”, writers who regularly congregated at the annual Worldcon, usually held on or around the Labor Day weekend. Since the early 1970s, he has also attended regional science fiction conventions, and since 1986 Martin has participated annually in Albuquerque’s smaller regional convention Bubonicon, near his New Mexico home. He was the Guest of Honor at the 61st World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto, held in 2003.

HBO Productions purchased the television rights for the A Song of Ice and Fire series in 2007 and began airing the fantasy series on their US premium cable channel on April 17, 2011. Titled Game of Thrones, it ran weekly for ten episodes, each approximately an hour long. Although busy completing A Dance With Dragons and other projects, George R. R. Martin was heavily involved in the production of the television series adaptation of his books. Martin’s involvement included the selection of a production team and participation in scriptwriting; the opening credits list him as a co-executive producer of the series. The series was renewed shortly after the first episode aired.

While he did not endorse Barack Obama in 2008, Martin endorsed him for re-election in 2012 calling Obama the most intelligent president since Jimmy Carter. In 2014, Martin endorsed Democratic Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico.

Martin has been criticized by some of his readers for the long periods between books in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, notably the six-year gap between the fourth volume, A Feast for Crows (2005), and the fifth volume, A Dance with Dragons (2011). In 2010, Martin had responded to fan criticisms by saying he was unwilling to write only his A Song of Ice and Fire series, noting that working on other prose and compiling and editing different book projects have always been part of his working process. Writer Neil Gaiman famously wrote on his blog in 2009 to a critic of Martin’s pace, “George R. R. Martin is not your bitch”. Gaiman later went on to state that writers are not machines and that they have every right to work on other projects if they want to.

The second season, based on the second A Song of Ice and Fire novel A Clash of Kings, began airing on HBO in the US on April 1, 2012. The second season was nominated for 12 Emmy Awards, including another Supporting Actor nomination for Dinklage. It went on to win six of those Emmys in the Technical Arts categories, which were awarded the week before the regular televised 2012 awards show. The second-season episode “Blackwater”, written by Martin, was nominated the following year for the 2013 Hugo Award in the Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form category; that episode went on to win the Hugo Award at LoneStarCon 3, the 71st World Science Fiction Convention. In addition to Martin, show-runners Benioff and Weiss (who contributed several scenes to the final screenplay) and episode director Neil Marshal (who expanded the scope of the episode on set) received Hugo statuettes.

He and McBride are supporters of the Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary in New Mexico. In early 2013, he purchased Santa Fe’s Jean Cocteau Cinema and Coffee House, which had been closed since 2006. He had the property completely restored, including both its original 35 mm capability to which was added digital projection and sound; the Cocteau officially reopened for business on August 9, 2013. In 2019 he opened a bookstore named Beastly Books, after Beauty and the Beast, next to Jean Cocteau. Martin has also supported Meow Wolf, an arts collective in Santa Fe, having pledged $2.7 million towards a new art-space in January 2015.

In 2014, Martin launched a campaign on Prizeo to raise funds for Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary and the Food Depot of Santa Fe. As part of the campaign, Martin offered one donor the chance to accompany him on a trip to the wolf sanctuary, including a helicopter ride and dinner. Martin also offered those donating $20,000 or more the opportunity to have a character named after them and “killed off” in an upcoming A Song of Ice and Fire novel. The campaign garnered media attention and raised a total of $502,549.

On November 20, 2015, writing on his LiveJournal blog, Martin advocated for allowing Syrian refugees into the United States. Immediately following Bernie Sanders’ defeat in the U.S. Democratic primary election, he supported Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the general 2016 United States presidential election, and criticized Donald Trump during the election and following her defeat, commenting that Trump would “become the worst president in American history”.

In August 2016 Martin announced that Universal Cable Productions had acquired the rights to adapt the Wild Cards novels into a television series. In 2017, Martin confirmed he would serve as an executive producer of the HBO television series adaptation of the 2010 novel Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor. Martin also contributed to an upcoming FromSoftware video game titled Elden Ring, writing the worldbuilding aspects for it.

By the end of 2016, all seasons up to season 6 (which premiered on April 24, 2016) had been aired on HBO and all seasons had been released on DVD and/or Blu-ray for home viewing (see List of Game of Thrones episodes). The company confirmed on July 18, 2016 that season 7 would consist of seven episodes instead of the usual ten, and would premiere later than usual, in mid-2017, because of the later filming schedule. This was necessary in order to be shooting during the winter season in Europe. Season 7 was expected to air in mid 2017. The first footage from the season was revealed in a new promotional video that featured clips from its new and returning original shows for the coming year on November 28, 2016, showcasing Jon Snow, Sansa Stark and Arya Stark. Like the previous season, it would largely consist of original content not found in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, but also adapts material from the upcoming sixth and seventh novels: The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring.

For season 8, in November 2016, President of Programming Casey Bloys indicated that he had had preliminary discussions about a prequel spinoff to the Game of Thrones series with Martin. In May 2017, HBO commissioned five screenwriters – Max Borenstein, Jane Goldman, Brian Helgeland, Carly Wray and Bryan Cogman – to develop individual spin-offs. All of the writers are to be working individually with Martin. According to Casey Bloys, Martin is co-writing two of the four announced scripts. The first episode of season 8 was broadcast on April 14, 2019. This season had a total of six episodes.

In December 2016, Martin was a key speaker at the Guadalajara International Book Fair 2016 in Mexico where the author provided hints about the next two books in the series A Song of Ice and Fire.

In 2017, Martin recalled that he had started writing science fiction-horror hybrids in the late 1970s to disprove a statement from a critic claiming that science fiction and horror were opposites and therefore incompatible. Martin considered Sandkings (1979) the best known of these. Another was the novella Nightflyers (1980), whose screen and television rights were purchased by Vista in 1984, which produced a 1987 film adaptation, Nightflyers, with a screenplay co-written by Martin. Martin was unhappy about having to cut plot elements in order to accommodate the film’s small budget. While not a hit at theatres, Martin believes that the film saved his career, and that everything he has written since exists in large part because of it. He has also written at least one piece of political-military fiction, “Night of the Vampyres”, collected in Harry Turtledove’s anthology The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century (2001).

In 2017, Martin announced that he was funding The Miskatonic Scholarship. The Miskatonic Scholarship allows a writer of Lovecraftian cosmic horror to attend the Odyssey workshop, a six-week writing workshop held at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire.

In 2018, Martin called The Lord of the Rings, The Great Gatsby, Gone with the Wind, Great Expectations, Lonesome Dove, Catch-22, and Charlotte’s Web “favorites all, towering masterpieces, books that changed my life”.

Martin actively contributes to his blog, Not a Blog; in April 2018 he moved his blog from Livejournal to his own website.

In May 2019, Martin endorsed Joe Biden for President in 2020.

In 2020, Martin gave a speech at the Hugo awards event which some critics considered racist; Martin mispronounced several names, including that of R. F. Kuang, which she considered a microaggression. Martin later apologized for mispronouncing foreign names.