Last week, on 26th June 2020 author Victoria (V.E.) Schwab tweeted:
“Forgot, when I was 26 or so, I criticised the relentless sexual assault and portrayal of female characters in a book (without tagging author) and he tracked me down, and set his followers after me, encouraging them as they called me b*tch and c*nt.”
“This was Mark Lawrence.”
Picking up on this there was a discussion thread around this topic in the Fantasy Faction Facebook group, where somebody tagged Mark Lawrence in a comment, and he responded: “What happened was that many years ago when I was new to Twitter I retweeted Schwab’s negative comment about Prince of Thorns. I shouldn’t have done that. As I recall three or four people replied to say that they disagreed – I don’t think any of them were insulting. But one of them had called someone else a cunt in a tweet posted an hour before mine and Schwab saw that and believed it was directed at her. That’s the full extent of it. I shouldn’t have retweeted her and I should have made more effort to ensure she knew the “cunt” tweet was unrelated – but I believe she had blocked me almost immediately.”
