Eric Rücker Eddison

Born in Yorkshire in 1882, Eric Rücker Eddison was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Oxford, and went on to work for the Board of Trade, eventually rising to a senior post in public service. Alongside that career, he wrote the books for which he is now remembered, publishing under the name E. R. Eddison.

His most famous novel, The Worm Ouroboros (1922), is celebrated for its heroic scale, archaic music, and fully imagined world. He later expanded his reputation with the Zimiamvian books, a sequence that began in the 1930s and was completed posthumously after his death in 1945.

Eddison also had a deep interest in Norse and Icelandic literature, and that love of saga and myth runs through his fiction. Readers often come to him for the richness of his language and the sheer boldness of his imagination, especially if they enjoy fantasy that feels legendary, strange, and larger than life.