Matt Barron grew up loving to read and to watch movies. He always knew he enjoyed science fiction and fantasy, but in 1979 his uncle took him to see a new movie called Star Wars and he was hooked for life. Then Dungeons & Dragons came along and there was no looking back. He went to university hoping to find a girlfriend. Instead, the Lord found him, and he spent most of his time from then on in the coffee shop, witnessing and serving his God. Along the way, he managed to acquire a Doctorate in History and met the love of his life, Rachel. Now married to Rachel for more than twenty years, Matt has two adult children and a burning desire to combine the genre he loves with the faith that saved him.

Matt’s path to novel writing has not been a straight one, as life seemed to decide he needed to explore other forms of writing first. He first completed a 100k word PhD History thesis, entitled “Religion: Jedi” Myth and Metaphysics in Science Fiction Film from 1977 – 1997. However, academia didn’t have any jobs for talking about sci-fi film, and a PhD makes you wildly overqualified to be a film reviewer. So instead, Matt had to find other applications for his skills. To that end, he found work writing policy documents for a major Australian university, a local government and submissions to the Australian Senate.

There’s also been some excursions into film and television. Matt’s written feature film scripts, some of which have been optioned and are in production. His own self-funded feature, a terrorist thriller called The Project, is in pre-production to be remade. He appears in a film he co-wrote called Thorns & Thistles at the End of the World, and was once funded by ScreenWest in Australia to develop a sci-fi television series. He acts and directs at times, though his main love is writing. One of his greatest achievements in filmmaking to date was to secure a pitch meeting with a Hollywood representative of the Lionsgate Company…which never led to anything significant. That’s Hollywood for you. They say there are a thousand doors in Hollywood, but only ten are open at any given time. Turned out that door was closed.

Fiction-wise Matt pitched himself to Wizards of the Coast, publishers of the world’s most famous roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, getting close but never quite making the cut in public calls for writers. He wrote Manticore’s Run, a sci-fi novel for hire for a RPG startup called Dead Stars. He wrote a novel Leandra for his wife, which was self-published in two parts as The Wolf Girl & The Grand List. There’s been a lot of training, practice and a couple of false-starts on the road to Rage of Lions, his #1 bestselling series on Amazon.