Richard Swan is a critically acclaimed British genre writer. His debut fantasy novel, The Justice of Kings, was an instant Sunday Times bestseller and has been translated into nine languages. His other work includes the Great Silence trilogy, as well as the Infinite State (2026), and fiction for Black Library and Grimdark Magazine.

Richard is a qualified lawyer, and before writing full time spent ten years litigating multimillion pound commercial disputes in London. He currently lives in Winchester with his wife and three young sons.

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Welcome to the Hive, Richard! Congratulations on the release of Grave Empire. For some of our readers who might not know, can you tell us a bit about it? What can they expect?

Grave Empire is a dark flintlock horror fantasy set 200 years after the events of my Empire of the Wolf trilogy (though it is a stand-alone series). The story begins when a pair of monks from a sect practising forbidden magic bring news of the ‘Great Silence’ to the Sovan Empress, a prophecy which is supposed to herald the end of days. We follow three characters as they become enmeshed in the ramifications of this: Renata Rainer, the deputy ambassador to the Stygion, a vicious and enigmatic race of mermen who may just hold the answer as to what the Great Silence actually is; Peter Kleist, a young lieutenant sent to the very outermost edges of the Empire, to a vast forest haunted with spooky, gristly goings-on; and Count Lamprecht von Oldenburg, a Sovan a senator who has been secretly dabbling in black magic for a decade and who is about to unleash a catastrophe on the world.

Your book is set in the same world as your first trilogy, The Empire of the Wolf, but in the future during an Industrial Revolution. Did you always plan to explore more of the world outside of Sova? And was this progression of the Empire something you had always wanted to explore? 

I definitely wanted to keep progressing the timeline of the Empire forwards by a few centuries. The idea was that there would be this constant background war in heaven that would periodically bleed into the mortal realm, and as time went on, different casts of characters across different time periods would have to deal with it to the point of its ultimate and spectacular climax. I’d love to go forward another two hundred years after the Great Silence for a final trilogy. Time (and sales) will tell! 

As well as the race of wolfmen, Grave Empire also features the Stygion, mer-men. Can you tell us more about them? Were they based on any specific mythology you had come across? 

Both the wolfmen and Stygion were created after the sudden and catastrophic conjunction of the mortal plane and the afterlife, which caused a great volume of raw sorcery to flood into the world and fuse together people and animals in the vicinity. Many of the hybrids subsequently died out in the following centuries, but the mermen and wolfmen were able to evolve to self-sustaining stability. They are not based mythology I am aware of, they are simply fantastical elements I wanted to incorporate into what is otherwise a fairly grounded series. 

You’re transported to the Empire in the middle of a war. Who would you rather fight alongside, the wolfmen or the mer-men, and why? 

I would rather be fighting alongside the mermen. I would certainly not like to fight against them, because they ride great white sharks into battle, and I can’t think of many things more terrifying than an armoured white shark that is actively trying to bite your head off!

Nils: A wise decision!

What I love about your books is that you write epic fantasy coupled with a dark supernatural mystery plot. What inspired you to blend these two genres together? 

It almost happened by accident. When I was writing the Justice of Kings, I needed to come up with some sort of limit on the magical powers that the Justices have so that they couldn’t just immediately solve every single crime they came across in a matter of seconds. With the practice of necromancy, I thought it would be cool to have it so that whilst you can certainly visit the afterlife and question a dead person, in so doing you are at risk of being attacked by demons(!). It was initially supposed to be just a throwaway spooky reference, a passing mystery with no great bearing on the plot. But I liked it so much that I began to flesh out the pantheon and the taxonomy of heaven, and to make the afterlife a real, tangible, Dante-esque place with actual nations and demonic and angelic kings and queens et cetera. I always loved Wayne Barlow’s Hell/Inferno artwork and this was a big source of inspiration for me. 

Are there any specific epic fantasy and horror novels which have inspired your writing?

A lot of what inspires my fantasy writing is historical non-fiction, which makes up about 60% of what I read for pleasure. I don’t read a tremendous amount of fantasy, and I grew up reading a lot more science-fiction than anything else. I would say Iain Banks’ Culture series, Peter F Hamilton’s Night Dawn sequence, and the writing of Dan Abnett — all sci-fi — influenced me more heavily than anything else in my teens.

Let’s chat about your characters! Both Secretary Renata and Peter, particularly, go through quite the hellish journey throughout. Had you always planned how their story arcs would develop or did this evolve as you wrote? 

Because my plots are quite complex and involve many moving parts I tend to plan them quite meticulously before I begin. That’s not to say things can’t change and Peter’s story is a perfect example of this. I had a decent idea of his overall arc but it wasn’t until he met the [spoiler] that I just let the wheels come off and see where the story took me. Needless to say it went to some very dark, very strange places, but I’m thrilled with the result. You will never guess where he ends up at the end of the trilogy.

Nils: I dread to think! I’m guessing nowhere pleasant 😅

Renata’s storyline on the other hand is the supporting beam for the rest of the story, and although she is not the first character we meet in the novel, she is the main character. As a result, her arc cleaved very much to the plan I had made for it.

Without spoilers did you have a scene of theirs you most enjoyed writing? 

For Renata, definitely meeting the mer-people for the first time! 

Nils: That was one of my favourite scenes to read. 

As for Peter, there’s a chapter called “Leaving the New East” towards the end of the novel which is not only my favourite of his chapters, I also think it’s one of the best chapters I’ve ever written in any novel. This will probably feel like a strange choice to readers familiar with it, but I think from a craft perspective it’s some of my best work.

Nils: It really was a great chapter, Richard.

And we have to talk about Von Oldenburg, who I bloody despised at times! What’s up with him, Richard?! What inspired his personality?! 

😂

Almost everything from Lamprecht von Oldenburg’s perspective was a joy to write, though almost impossible to talk about without spoilers.  It’s always fun to write unhinged villains, but whilst I think he is often bullheaded and aggressive, I think the most shocking aspect of his storyline is how measured and controlled he is in applying his evil (until he turns more or less insane later in the novel). Von Oldenburg is just emblematic of an old, bombastic, 19th-century imperialist, very much a “Make Sova Great Again” character.

If you were to spend the day with any one of your characters, who would you choose and what would you do?

I think it would be tremendous fun / horribly anxiety inducing to spend a day with Renata in the underwater realms of Ozeanland and Maris, though I think having to wear a lungfish, and the constant threat of being eaten by white sharks, might put me off. 

Your cover just screams epic and awesome. How involved in the process were you? Was this the aesthetic you hoped the artist would portray?

The cover is excellent. It’s by Philip Harris, who has a very distinct style which I think fits really nicely with the etching/lithograph vibe of the 18th-century era. I was consulted closely from the beginning by Orbit and whilst they have the final say on everything, they were very good at involving me in coming up with the different elements and checking for narrative accuracy etc. 

2026 is shaping up to be a busy year for you with the planned release of Grave Empire’s sequel and the first book in a new sci-fi series. What can you tell us about both? Can we expect more nightmare fuelled horrors in both? 

I actually have three books coming out in 2026: Steel Gods (Great Silence 2), The Infinite State (first in a new sci fi series) and a Warhammer 40,000 IP novel. 

Steel Gods of course picks up after the events of Grave Empire, with characters old and new. There’s a nice nautical focus in this one, sort of like a fantastical Master & Commander, which I’m really excited about. Lots more strange cosmic weirdness as well, and of course the usual dark, horrible violence, insane people doing insane things, armoured sharks battling sea monsters—all the good stuff. 

The Infinite State is a book I’m exceptionally excited about. It’s set in a really nasty dystopian fertility cult space nation called the Decurion Empire, and it follows primarily Katherine Fuller, the wife of a Party luminary, as she attempts to break free of its totalitarian clutches and set up a new democracy on a virgin planet. It’s dark and bleak but it’s also got that really cool frontier nation-building aspect so we get to see a country being created from the ground up and all of the chicanery that goes along with it. There’ll be lots more details to come over the next year or so!

The final book is a novel for Black Library which is an IP I have wanted to write for since my teens so very much a bucket list item for me. I’ve done a few short stories for them in the past year or two and this will be my first novel length piece. No details to share yet but again I’m excited about it!

Nils: Wow, you really will be busy! 

Finally, what is the one thing you hope readers take away from your writing?

I would hope that when a reader picks up a Richard Swan novel they know they are getting some interesting examination of the relationship between the individual and the nationstate, which is something I have been fascinated by since university. Anything to do with law and the judicial system, political authority, foreign policy, espionage, conflict, and the morality and ethics of all of them. So, you know. Light fare.  

Grave Empire is available now – you can order your copy HERE