Mike Noel-Smith

Mike Noel-Smith did not set out to write fantasy. He set out to survive it. Years of Army service taught him discipline under pressure long before he ever put a dragon on a page. In 2003, he rowed across the Indian Ocean, an act of endurance that still shapes the way he writes resilience into every character he creates. Today he works as a global consultant, guiding organisations and leadership teams through the kind of high pressure decisions most people only read about. The idea for Ceres, the dragon guardian at the heart of The Ceres and Mike Chronicles, did not come from a writing desk. It came from Dartmoor, from long stretches of solitude in wild, empty country, where Mike first began to imagine a world in which dragons exist not to destroy history, but to protect it. That same instinct for real endurance runs through Wild Waters in the Roar, his memoir of ocean adventure, and it is the thread that connects everything he writes, fiction and nonfiction alike. The Ceres and Mike Chronicles follows historian Mike Harrison across pivotal, real moments in human history where knowledge itself is under attack, guided by Ceres and bound to an ancient malachite scale. It is a series written by someone who has tested his own limits in the real world before ever asking a reader to believe in dragons.