AK Larkwood Books in Order

A.K. Larkwood writes fantasy full of gods, ruins, bad bargains, and people trying to wriggle free of the stories other people have written for them. She studied English at St John's College, Cambridge, has worked in media relations, higher education, and law, and lives in Oxford.

She clearly likes the weird stuff.

Her debut novel, The Unspoken Name, came out in 2020 and introduced Csorwe, an orc girl raised for sacrifice who runs away with a wizard and ends up tied to him in far messier ways than simple rescue. The Thousand Eyes, published in 2022, takes that story into ruined worlds, old empires, and stranger magic. Larkwood was nominated for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer in 2020 and 2021.

One turning point in her writing life arrived in 2015, while she was sick with tonsillitis and staying at her parents' house. Looking for something to read, she pulled Ursula K. Le Guin's The Tombs of Atuan from a shelf. She had already spent years wrestling with an earlier werewolf novel, and reading that childhood favorite jolted a new idea loose.

The spark was specific. Larkwood has said she started wondering what would happen if the stranger who offers escape in a temple story was not a selfless guide but somebody complicated, needy, and maybe terrible. That question became the seed of The Unspoken Name, and it also points to what she does best: taking classic fantasy shapes and making the emotional bargain inside them much less comfortable.

Loyalty matters here.

So do gratitude, obligation, and the price of freedom. Larkwood has spoken openly about liking loyalty and betrayal, human sacrifice, immortals behaving badly, fantasy archaeology, and tense banquets where somebody gets murdered. Those interests are all over her work, but they never feel like a checklist. They show up as pressure on the characters, especially when love, debt, duty, and survival all point in different directions.

She has also written about why monsters and nonhuman characters appeal to her. For Larkwood, fantasy is a way to look at real life from another angle, and she likes stories that move away from treating ordinary humanity as the only center. That helps explain why her books are full of portal travel, strange religions, dead gods, and cultures that feel distinct from one another, but still stay grounded in very recognizable feelings like fear, longing, resentment, and devotion.

Readers who click with her books usually come for that mix. The Unspoken Name has sacrifice, murder, espionage, and a queer romance, but it also has dry humor and relationships that keep shifting shape. The Thousand Eyes widens the lens with relic expeditions, the fallen serpent empire of Echentyr, and the sense that history never stays buried for long.

Off the page, Larkwood comes across as funny, practical, and very specific about what she enjoys. She has mentioned that day-to-day life is much less dramatic than her fiction, and that one of her real thrills is cooking a new kind of lentil. That feels about right. The books go big, but the voice behind them is grounded, curious, and always interested in the human mess inside the spectacle.