Ed McDonald Books in Order

If you want dark frontier fantasy: Blackwing → Ravencry → Crowfall
If you want a younger lead and clan intrigue: Daughter of Redwinter → Traitor of Redwinter → Witch Queen of Redwinter
If you want to sample both sides of his work: Blackwing → Daughter of Redwinter
If you plan to read everything: Blackwing → Ravencry → Crowfall → Daughter of Redwinter → Traitor of Redwinter → Witch Queen of Redwinter

Ed McDonald writes fantasy novels full of ruined landscapes, battered loyalties, and people trying to do one decent thing in a world that keeps making that difficult. He made his novel debut with Blackwing in 2017, the first book in the Raven's Mark trilogy, and later launched a second trilogy with Daughter of Redwinter. Across both series, he mixes dark settings with brisk pacing and characters who feel tired, stubborn, and very human.

He has said he's been writing for as long as he can remember. As a child he loved The Lord of the Rings and the Fighting Fantasy books, and in his teens he was just as interested in making comics as in writing novels. That urge to build his own worlds never really went away.

He came to fantasy early, and stayed there.

McDonald studied Ancient History and Archaeology at the University of Birmingham, then Medieval History at Birkbeck, University of London. That history background shows up all over his fiction, not as homework, but as texture. His books care about borders, ruined empires, old weapons, and the way the past keeps hanging around long after people would rather forget it.

Before publication, he wrote a string of earlier novels that never became the breakout book. He has talked pretty plainly about them as practice, full of the cliches most writers have to work through. What changed was not just experience, but direction. He stopped trying to write carefully historical fantasy and let himself write stranger, more fantastical stories, with more damaged worlds and sharper emotional stakes.

That approach clicks in the Raven's Mark books, Blackwing, Ravencry, and Crowfall. The trilogy follows Ryhalt Galharrow across the Misery, a blighted frontier left behind by magical war. Readers who love these books usually point to the same things: the hard-driving pace, the grim humor, the ugly beauty of the setting, and Galharrow himself, a man with too much guilt and just enough loyalty left to keep going.

McDonald has said he tends to start with feeling before plot. He wants a book to deliver emotions like loss, heroism, tragedy, and victory against the odds, and then he builds the story that can carry them. That helps explain why his books move fast but still land emotionally. Even when the world is full of monsters, dead gods, and bad decisions, the heart of the story is usually a person trying to live with what they have done.

Then he changed gears.

With Daughter of Redwinter, followed by Traitor of Redwinter and Witch Queen of Redwinter, he shifted to a younger protagonist, Raine, and a different kind of fantasy landscape. These books still have danger and dark magic, but they lean more into clan politics, forbidden power, ghosts, and questions of identity. McDonald has said he wanted the setting to have a Scottish feel, and the series has a tighter fortress-and-clan structure than Raven's Mark, while keeping the same interest in pressure, consequence, and hard choices.

Outside fiction, he has studied medieval swordsmanship since 2013 and specializes in the Italian longsword. He is also open about loving tabletop role-play games, which makes sense once you see how much pleasure he takes in systems, factions, and contested power. He lives in London with his partner, the novelist Catriona Ward, and has worked as a university lecturer. The mix suits him: one foot in history, one in imagination, and both hands busy with swords or stories.