” Cecilia Dart-Thornton is the author of numerous bestselling fantasy novels, notably the Bitterbynde Trilogy. The Ill-Made Mute (her debut novel) and its two sequels in the Bitterbynde Trilogy went on to win fans and accolades across the globe.

The Ill-Made Mute was listed on Amazon’s Best, Locus Magazine’s Best First Novels, the Sydney Morning Herald’s Top Twenty and the Australian Publishers’ Association ‘Australia’s Favourite Read’. It is published in five languages and distributed in more than fifty countries around the world.

Cecilia has been described as ” . . . a genre-straddling wordsmith with one foot in the archives and the other in the stars. Half historian, half inventor, she shapes fiction with a jeweller’s precision and a folklorist’s ear — crafting everything from windswept Irish romantasy to diesel-drenched sci-fi with comet rings and ‘cold fire.’ She’s as comfortable digging into the valves of a 1960s shortwave radio as she is forging invented dialects for fantasy rebels.

“Equal parts Tolkien scholar and ceramicist, she’s got got a keen instinct for language, a taste for malapropisms that charm rather than clang, and a ruthless eye for purple prose. She’s published widely (and under more than one name), but she still asks the sharp questions that push a book — or a brand — to its finest edge.

Basically: if a bard, a tech-savvy cartographer, and a myth-chaser walked into a bar, she’d already be at the counter, polishing off the final draft.”

 In 2021 Cecilia served as a judge for the World Fantasy Awards.