Bestselling Fantasy Author Victoria Aveyard on the Book That Made Her a Storyteller

The “Red Queen” author returns to the Tolkien trilogy that made her a writer and previews her upcoming adult fantasy debut, “Tempest.”

LOS ANGELES, CA, UNITED STATES, September 3, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — On a recent episode of Books That Changed My Life, #1 New York Times bestselling author Victoria Aveyard sat down with Chris “Bulldog” Collins for a deep dive into J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, a trilogy she read more than ten times in the seventh grade.

Aveyard traces her career back to a single afternoon in 2001, when she walked out of a screening of The Fellowship of the Ring and straight into a Target to buy the paperback.

“A soul had been breathed into my body when I watched that film,” she tells Collins. “It wasn’t just ‘you love stories.’ It’s ‘you have to tell stories yourself.’”

She and Collins dig into what she considers the trilogy’s beating heart: the thread of grief and sorrow running beneath the adventure.

Aveyard is candid about loving a book with “no women in the Fellowship,” a tension that has shaped her bibliography. “Female rage is the core of everything I write,” she says, pointing to an Éowyn speech as a passage she still carries with her today.

She offers advice she wishes someone had given her younger self: “What makes you weird now is going to make you successful later.”

The conversation closes with a first look at Tempest, a romantic pirate fantasy she describes as her “love letter to Pirates of the Caribbean” and Black Sails. The two discuss characters, setting, themes, and more, with Aveyard reading aloud from sections of the unpublished proof.

Aveyard also shares the book’s interesting backstory: her original 300,000-word manuscript was simply too long to physically bind and print, leading her publisher to split the book into a duology.

To celebrate the book’s release, Books That Changed My Life is giving away 50 signed copies of Tempest to viewers. Full entry details are available in the episode description.

Watch the full conversation HERE.

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Victoria Aveyard on “The Lord of the Rings”:

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