Joseph Delaney

Joe worked as an apprentice engineer and fitter before getting his A-Levels at night school and then becoming an English teacher. He would write in the early mornings before school until his first children’s book, The Spook’s Apprentice about Tom Ward the seventh son of a seventh son who trained to fight ghosts and creatures from the Dark, was published by Random House Children’s Books in 2004.

He then left teaching and went on to write 12 more titles in his globally bestselling dark fantasy series, The Wardstone Chronicles, plus 17 other titles, predominantly set in the same world. The books have now been translated into thirty languages and won many awards including the Lancashire Book Award. In 2014, The Spook’s Apprentice was made into a movie called The Seventh Son starring Ben Barnes, Julianne Moore and Jeff Bridges. Joe got to go to Canada to watch the filming, which he absolutely loved.

He travelled widely to promote his books, spending lots of the winter in New Zealand and Singapore, as he hated the cold, but most of his time was spent in his home county Lancashire – a place embedded in all of his writing.

Joe was writing right up until the end of his life and was about to embark on the next round of edits for the fourth in his Brother Wulf sequence. He passed away in Manchester in 2022 at the age of 77, and his last novel, Brother Wulf: Wulf’s War, was released posthumously the following year.

He leaves behind his second wife (his first wife Marie died in 2007), two sons and a daughter, and his grandchildren.

Source: https://josephdelaneyauthor.com/