Author: thatthornguy

In defence of Mark Lawrence

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.”

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Announcing the winners of the The Girl and the Stars Art Contest

First of all I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who took the time and submitted an entry (or more) to this competition, as well as to Mark Lawrence and Pen Astridge for their help in considering the submissions. Once again we were grateful to receive so many wonderful pieces and appreciate all the different depictions of Mark’s characters.

Without futher ado, the three winning entries of this competition are:

Many congratulations to Mayticks for winning first place with her entry “We Share A Bond” (12 points)

to Mathilda Spabo for winning second place with her entry “Abbess Glass and Nona” (10 points)

and to Aurélia Quéré for winning third place with her entry “Ancrath Brothers” (9 points)

We’d also like to give a special mention to the runner-up, @braincells, for her entry “Escape”

Once again very many thanks to everyone who took the time to enter. Please find all entries one more time below:

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