About Malory

I'm a PhD candidate researching men's reading habits. I'm also an author who writes the books that research keeps telling me are missing.

Before the late nineteenth century, men were the dominant fiction readers. The idea that fiction is for women and reading is what boys won't do is a recent cultural invention — a century and a bit old, recent enough that someone's great-grandfather would have laughed at it. It has hardened steadily since. By 2025, UK reading enjoyment had hit its lowest point in two decades. The gender gap is now 13.4 percentage points. Daily reading among 8–18s has halved since 2005. PISA 2022 found girls outperforming boys in 78 of 80 education systems, and about one in three boys across the OECD can't reach baseline reading proficiency.

None of which is because boys can't read. They can. The gap seems to be about what boys value rather than what they're capable of, which is a different problem to fix. The reasons are fairly well-mapped by now — school makes reading feel like work, and peer culture codes it as a girl thing, and the publishing industry has more or less stopped making the books that used to pull boys in. The testing itself doesn't help either. There's a study where reframing a reading test as a game more or less reversed the gap, which tells you something. Boys can still read perfectly well. The bit we've lost, I think, is knowing how to interest them.

So my doctoral argument runs like this: LitRPG and progression fantasy are part of the answer. The genre slips reading inside the structures boys already engage with — progression systems, stats, the small dopamine of a level-up — and gets fiction past whatever cultural filter would otherwise stop it. And it's still fiction, which matters, because the research is pretty clear that fiction is the text type that actually builds reading skill. It just happens to be fiction where things get done.

I also write it. Morgan & Merlin drops a reincarnated, cultivation-cursed protagonist into Dark Age Cornwall with the ghost of Merlin offering unhelpful commentary. The Soar Chronicles is a hardboiled detective series in a city where faith is literal currency. Punish the System, co-written with Cassius Lange, is a gritty post-apocalypse where surviving means tearing the establishment down. Under the name Jake Malory I write the combat-focused Psyker Marine — also known as the Galactic Invasion series — solo, and Arcane Galaxy, a space western co-authored with Troy Osgood. The Boy's Own Adventures line started with my son — partly to test whether the classic-adventure structure still works on a kid raised on screens, partly because I wanted him to have those books. I've also dropped a stack of stories into the Raconteur Press anthologies.

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 data for my doctorate, I'm rereading Terry Pratchett or watching the English cricket team find new ways to lose. I live in Birmingham.