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Games of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin says A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is one of the best things he’s ever written
George R. R. Martin wrote A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and Game of Thrones thinking they were too big to ever be filmed
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When George R. R. Martin wrote the first of the Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas in 1998, the author didn’t think it could ever be filmed. Decades later, HBO is adapting those novellas with their A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms series, which premieres January 18, 2026.
“I didn’t picture any [adaptations],” Martin says during the A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms spotlight panel at NYCC. “I worked in television for like 10 years, from the mid-80s to the mid-80s, and at a certain point I said I’ve got to get back to books. In those ten years I worked in television, everything I wrote was always too big and too expensive. I did my job, I was on the writing staff, I would write a second or a third draft, and it would be cheaper and smaller and all that.”
Realizing he was being limited, Martin returned to writing, and that’s when some of his greatest books were written. “After a decade of that, when I went back and I started Game of Thrones, I said, the hell with that, I’m just going to write something as big as I can imagine, and no one will ever film it because it will be monstrously too big and too expensive. So, I wrote Game of Thrones, and to surprise me, that’s the one that actually got made.”
“Dunk and Egg came along a little later, a smaller thing for a series of anthologies that Robert Silverberg was editing. That was a lot of fun too.”
While Game of Thrones is more well known, Martin believes the Dunk and Egg novellas, which were later collected in The Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, to be some of his best work.
“I loved it, and when I finished it I said this is one of the best things I’ve ever done. And I still feel that way. I still feel these stories are some of the best I’ve ever done. And [producer Ira Parker] and his amazing team have done an amazing job of adapting them, and what you see is going to be very similar to what I wrote.”
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premieres January 18, 2026 on HBO.
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