Donald D Allan Books in Order

Donald D Allan was born in Ottawa, Canada, and grew up in a Scottish household, which helps explain why Celtic language and myth run through his fiction. He has said he was the sort of kid who would sneak off to the library and stay there with a book. Fantasy got its hooks in early.

That love of invented worlds never really went away.

A big early spark came in grade 5, when a teacher introduced him to The Lord of the Rings. He has also pointed to writers like Elizabeth Moon, Robin Hobb, and Katharine Kerr as lasting influences, but the core dream was simple. He wanted to see his own name on a novel. At Glebe Collegiate Institute in Ottawa, author and teacher Brian Doyle urged him to publish, though Allan did not act on that advice right away.

For a long time, the navy came first. Allan served as a naval reservist for nine years, then joined the Regular Force and built a career in the Royal Canadian Navy. He has described himself as an information warfare specialist working on interoperability among allied navies. Writing stayed in the background while work and family took center stage, but it never disappeared.

The shift from daydream to finished book came while he was posted to Washington, D.C., working with the U.S. Navy at the Pentagon. The idea for the New Druids series took hold there, and he wrote his first full-length novel. Duilleog arrived in 2015 and introduced Will Arbor, a young man discovering that he may be the last druid in a world shaped by fear, power, and nature magic.

After that, the series kept growing.

Readers who start with Duilleog get a good sense of what Allan likes to do. Craobh pushes Will deeper into church politics and old mysteries. Stoc widens the frame as druids step into public view and civil war starts to loom. Freamhaigh drives Will's main storyline toward its hardest choices, and Cill Darae looks at the uneasy aftermath. Across the books, readers tend to come for the nature-based magic and the big power struggles, then stay for the way the world keeps opening outward.

Those books also picked up attention outside his own readership. Duilleog won a gold medal in the Dan Poynter's Global Ebook Awards, and the later New Druids novels added more medals, including four golds and one bronze across the first five books. Allan's public author voice is pretty relaxed about all of this. He jokes that he is a level-twelve geek, an introvert pretending to be an extrovert, and someone who is much better at planning chores than finishing them.

He lives in Ottawa with his wife Marilyn, their children James and Katherine, and the family dog, Woody. He has said he used to read to his children almost every night when he was home from sea, and that they especially loved the stories he made up for them. Family comes first for him, and that feels like a fair way to read his fiction too. He builds big fantasy conflicts, but he keeps bringing them back to people, choices, and the world they are trying to protect.