Tim Leach Books in Order

Tim Leach grew up in Essex, spent time living in London, and now makes his home in Sheffield. He studied creative writing at the University of Warwick, and later returned there to teach fiction, so books have shaped both his work and his day job. Sheffield, with the Peak District close by, also suits a writer who likes climbing and long views.

Before the novels, there were bookshops. Leach has worked in bookshops in London and Greece, and that steady life around shelves, customers, and other people's stories feels like a useful clue to the writer he became, curious, widely read, and drawn to places where history still feels close.

Writing was not the first plan. He has said that when he was younger he wanted to be an actor, but at university writing slowly won the argument. He liked the creative control it gave him, and the way it let him build character, rhythm, and atmosphere from the ground up.

History got there first.

Leach has said he more or less fell into historical fiction by accident while reading Herodotus and trying to fill a gap in his classical knowledge. He came across the story of Croesus and knew that was the book he wanted to write. The result was The Last King of Lydia, his debut novel, which was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2013.

That book, and its follow-up The King and the Slave, show what readers often like about his work. He takes figures who can seem half buried in legend and makes them feel recognisably human, ambitious, frightened, proud, grieving, and often trapped by the values of their own age. He is interested in unreliable source texts and in the crossover points between myth and history, and he is less interested in polishing the past than in testing what old stories still say about happiness, power, and being wrong.

Then he changed countries and centuries.

With Smile of the Wolf, Leach moved to tenth-century Iceland and found a different kind of pressure cooker. The novel grew out of his fascination with the Icelandic sagas, with their feuds, friendships, hard landscapes, and unforgiving code of honour. While drafting it, he travelled around Iceland with his father to get a feel for the place, and readers tend to remember the book for exactly that sense of place, along with the way friendship and revenge pull against each other.

His later fiction opens out again in the Sarmatian Trilogy, A Winter War, The Iron Way, and Hollow Throne. These books follow displaced Sarmatian warriors on the edge of the Roman world, and they bring together several things Leach does especially well: strange frontier settings, cultures under pressure, and characters trying to keep hold of themselves when survival demands compromise. The trilogy began with A Winter War, which was shortlisted for the HWA Gold Crown Award.

Across all of this, a pattern appears. Leach likes worlds where danger is physical, but also social. A bad decision can get you killed, but shame, pride, duty, and belonging can be just as powerful. His novels are full of kings, warriors, exiles, storytellers, and uneasy allies, people pushed into choices they cannot neatly escape.

Away from the page, he still sounds like someone who enjoys a challenge. He has spoken about rock climbing, running, board games, and roleplaying games, and older author blurbs also mention chess and whisky. He once compared climbing and writing because both carry a certain solitude, which feels like a good key to his fiction too, patient, searching, and very alert to what people do when there is no easy way down.

These days he is still in Sheffield, still teaching, and still writing.