Damion Hunter Books in Order

If you want the full brothers-at-war saga: The Centurions → Barbarian Princess → The Emperor's Games → The Border Wolves
If you want frontier Britain and a new hero: Shadow of the Eagle
If you want Roman Britain with a healer at the center: The Legions of the Mist → The Wall at the Edge of the World

Damion Hunter is one of the pen names of Amanda Cockrell, a novelist and longtime teacher who has spent much of her career writing historical fiction. She grew up in Ojai, California, a small town with a strong Hollywood presence, where writers, actors, and odd bits of movie culture were part of the background. Story was close at hand from the start. Her father was a screenwriter, and her mother wrote screenplays and novels.

Before novels took over, she wrote whatever paid the bills.

That meant newspaper feature writing, then ad copy for a rock radio station, and later more formal study at Hollins, where she earned degrees, including a master's in English and creative writing. It is a practical route into fiction, and it shows. Her books are carefully researched, but they also move with the pace of someone who learned to write on deadlines and keep a reader turning pages.

Her path to ancient Rome came through reading. A college friend gave her Rosemary Sutcliff's novels, and Cockrell found a period that stayed with her. Under the Damion Hunter name, she went on to write Roman stories such as The Centurions, Barbarian Princess, The Emperor's Games, The Border Wolves, The Legions of the Mist, The Wall at the Edge of the World, and Shadow of the Eagle.

What readers often like about these books is that they do not stay at the level of emperors and speeches. Cockrell tends to focus on soldiers, medics, families, and people living on the far edges of empire. Roman Britain comes up again and again, along with divided loyalties, class, military duty, folklore, and the question of what home means when a conquering power is remaking the land under your feet. Even the action-heavy books leave room for grief, love, and moral doubt.

She does not only write about Rome, and she never really has.

Under her own name, she has published novels including Pomegranate Seed, What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay, and Coyote Weather. Those books move through very different times and places, from the Hollywood blacklist to young adulthood in California during the Vietnam era. Her work on the pre-Columbian Americas shows the same habits that shape the Roman novels, strong settings, close attention to daily life, and characters trying to find a place inside large historical forces.

Teaching has been just as important in her career as publishing. In 1992, she and R.H.W. Dillard founded Hollins University's graduate program in children's literature, one of the early programs in the country devoted to the study and writing of children's and young adult books. After retiring from that role, she became managing editor of The Hollins Critic and continued to teach writing. She has also received fiction fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts.

She has spent a long time helping other writers find their footing.

Now based in Roanoke, Virginia, Cockrell is still closely tied to Hollins and still writing across wide stretches of history. Whether she is following Roman troops into wet northern border country or looking back at California in the late 1960s, her fiction keeps returning to the same human questions, belonging, duty, memory, and the price people pay for the worlds they inherit.