About Sam

Hello, new best friend!

I'm Sam Blood. I write young adult (meaning teenage fiction - aimed at 14-16 year olds, but I have fans of all ages!) fantasy fiction. I adore magical companions, emotional character arcs, romance, suspense and thrills and epic friendships. My novels are full of eccentric dragon-parrots and sassy manticores.

I'm from Auckland, New Zealand born-and-bred, having been raised on movies on VHS like Dragonheart and Dragonworld, and books such as the Unicorn Chronicles by Bruce Coville. I lived primarily between Takapuna and Devonport, which to me felt like the muggle world and the magical world respectively. Devonport was always full of secret parks and abandoned tunnels, seeming to brim with the prospect of hidden magical portals and slumbering monsters.

From the age of nine I started writing about the story of Shadows. It started from stories of magical creatures, the other halves of ourselves, who lived in another world. I'd tell these stories to my godsister to get to sleep, usually after her godmother made us copious amounts of apple crumble. It also grew from a short story I wrote, where a mysterious woman named Melissa Cameron visited three youths in a house where they were working on a project to change the world.

I was very popular at Belmont Intermediate, blocking out scenes in my head by pretending to be a dragon on the schoolyard by myself. I was what you would call a 'special boy.'

At 14 years old, after encouragement from John Marsden, author of Tomorrow When the War Began, I submitted my manuscript for Shadows to the publishers but got rejected.

I shelved the manuscript, unsure how to make it better. I got into stand-up comedy. I tried to be an actor, a Zookeeper and a climate activist. Years later, my best friend Dean passed away suddenly. He'd always been the biggest advocate for Shadows, ever since we met on our first day of Intermediate school.

With Dean gone I wanted some way to honour the guy who had given me a friend when I'd had none. I poured all my memories of our friendship into the new Shadows manuscript, including our unique comedic banter, and published it in 2015. Books 2 to 6 quickly finished, completing the Shadows Series.

Since then readers from all over the world have read Shadows and sent me emails, including pictures of exactly what their own Shadow counterparts would look like!

After starting to mildly wonder what my happy ever after would ever look like in terms of finding my own princess, I got hand-delivered a more exciting story arc then any I had written. In 2022 I met Emasha, an amazing lawyer from Sri Lanka who was going to go home in a month, possibly forever, to work in the Supreme Court. I resolved to use those 30 days to try to convince the woman I was smitten with to fall in love with me.

Emasha left for Sri Lanka, and getting the families on board proved to be a rollercoaster. Never before had I suspected myself to be in an international forbidden romance, essentially the main character in my very own romantasy novel.

Now... I am Emasha's family's favourite child! (Or I like to think so. They do feed me delicious amounts of parippu) Ema and I had the most beautiful Sri Lankan and kiwi style weddings, and returned home in 2024 to start our new life of book writing, career pursuits and possibly making a podcast about the entire experience. To this day I can't believe that I'm hers and she's mine.

So yeah, that's me! Want to get in touch? Email me direct at sam@sambloodauthor.com