About Malory

I'm a PhD candidate researching men's reading habits, and I also write books. This might well sounds like two separate jobs but in practice the research keeps showing me which books are missing, so then I go off and write those for a bit. I find that the two things are feeding into each other more than I'd expected when I started on either of them!

The argument of the research, more or less is this. Before the late nineteenth century, it is clear that men were the dominant fiction readers. Thus, this modern idea that fiction is, somehow, exclusively for women, and that reading is something 'a real boy' just won't do, is a very recent cultural invention. Certainly, it's recent enough that my great-grandfather would have found it a very strange thing to say.

Nevertheless, it's a viewpoint that's been hardening for some time now. We know that reading enjoyment in the UK has now hit its lowest point in decades, with the gender gap sitting at a huge 13.4 percentage points, and with daily reading among 8 to 18 year olds more than halving since 2005. We also see that PISA is regularly finding girls outperforming boys in 78 of the 80 education systems it measures. And around one in three boys across the OECD are not reaching even a baseline of reading proficiency.

My position is that none of this is because boys can't read. They obviously can, and when we take them away from school settings it is a gap that mostly disappears. What's actually shifted, I think, is what boys have decided reading is for.

Some of this is because schools have made reading feel like hard work. And some of it is due to a tricky peer culture that is coding reading as a girl thing. That means that boys pay a real social price for being seen with a book. And an awful lot of it, I argue, is because publishing has, more or less, now stopped making the books that used to pull boys towards reading in the first place!

Which is where the thesis and my fiction meet.

LitRPG and progression fantasy (and if you've not met the genre yet, these are books where the hero levels up on the page, in actual numbers) put reading inside a structure which boys already spend their time. And that means boys who supposedly don't read are getting through 700-page books at about one a week. The books get fiction past whatever cultural filter would normally be stopping it.

My 'Morgan & Merlin's Excellent Adventure' series drops a reincarnated modern protagonist into Dark Age Cornwall with the ghost of Merlin providing unhelpful commentary. And my Soar Chronicles is a hardboiled detective series set in a city where faith works as literal magical currency. And the Boy's Own Adventures line started as books for my son, partly as a test of whether classic adventure structure still works on a boy raised on screens. It does.

I work with Aethon Books, Legion Publishers, Soundbooth Theater, Raconteur Press, LitForge and Royal Guard to get these stories into print and audio.

When I'm not writing or wrangling thesis data, I'm usually rereading Terry Pratchett, or watching the England cricket team, which I wouldn't call relaxing exactly. I live in Birmingham.