Paul Kearney was born in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, in 1967. He went to a local grammar school, and then to Lincoln College, Oxford, where he read Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, and Middle English and was a keen member of the Mountaineering Society and the Officer Training Corps. He was also an enthusiastic and very bad rower.

Shortly after leaving Oxford, he went on a solitary climbing trip to the Isle of Skye, and it was after tumbling off a mountain there that the character of Michael Riven first came to him. The first half of The Way to Babylon was composed shortly after, and taken up by the literary agents Campbell, Thomson & McLaughlin. Richard Evans at Victor Gollancz bought the book, and Gollancz then published Kearney’s next seven books, including the Monarchies of God series.

In the eight years subsequent to the publication of The Way to Babylon, Kearney lived in Copenhagen, New Jersey, and Cambridgeshire, but at present he makes his home a stone’s throw from the sea in County Down, with his wife, two dogs, a beat-up old boat, and far too many books. At present he is working on The Ten Thousand for Solaris Books.