The Ballad of Sir Benfro is a five part epic fantasy series. Heavily influenced by Welsh language and mythology, it follows the adventures of the young dragon Sir Benfro and his human friend Errol Ramsbottom, as they battle against the forces of evil in Gwlad.
Because I’m a disorganised fellow, the map I drew as reference when I began writing the series was never tidied up and added to the books until the last one came out. My publisher, Penguin, took my barely-legible scribbling and gave it to a proper artist, Andrew Farmer, who came up with this:
There are five books in the series – not a trilogy as some people thought after I had self-published the first three. My editor for the Inspector McLean books – Alex Clarke – asked me if I had written anything else after that series had taken off. I mentioned the Benfro books, which I’d actually been working on for years before trying my hand at crime fiction. He wanted to read them, so I sent him all that I had written by then.
He liked them so much, he wanted to publish the series, which left me with a bit of a headache. I was at that point writing two Inspector McLean novels a year, and somehow needed to write the fourth and fifth Benfro books on top of that insane schedule. There had also been a ten year break since I’d written book three, which made picking up the threads interesting.
I managed though, and I’m pleased with the result. Benfro himself began as a silly throwaway comment from my other half while we were taking evening classes to learn Welsh. She pointed at the county name for Pembrokeshire – Sir Benfro – and said that it had to be a dragon, surely. From such tiny acorns do three quarters of a million words of epic fantasy grow…