George R.R. Martin Reveals He's Written 1,100 Pages of The Winds of Winter — When Will It Be Released?

Fifteen years. That is how long readers of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series have been waiting for the next instalment. In that time, the entire HBO television adaptation of Game of Thrones has aired, run its course and generated two spin-off series. The world has moved on.

Readers have aged. Some have given up entirely. Yet Martin persists in the painstaking process of completing The Winds of Winter, and now, at last, he has offered a glimpse into his progress.

The news is simultaneously encouraging and deflating. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the 77-year-old author revealed that he has completed approximately 1,100 pages of the manuscript. That is a substantial achievement. That is also nowhere near finished.

For fans who have invested years of their lives in these characters and their fates, the revelation that Martin still has considerable work ahead is both a glimmer of hope and a harbinger of further disappointment. What makes Martin's disclosure particularly intriguing is his candid acknowledgement of what lies ahead. He offered no release date. He provided no timeline.

Instead, he painted a picture of a work that could become the longest book in the entire series if he includes everything he envisions. The manuscript is still in flux, still being wrestled with, still demanding rewrites and reimagining.

'If I wound up doing everything in my head, this could be the longest book in the series,' he stated, a declaration that will send both shivers of anticipation and groans of despair through the fan community.

When Might Fans Actually See It?

The author's workload extends far beyond the page. Martin serves in producing capacities on multiple HBO productions, including the wildly successful House of the Dragon and the newly launched A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which premiered on Jan. 18.

These commitments, while keeping the Game of Thrones universe alive in viewers' minds, inevitably pull his attention away from the manuscript. It is a tension that Martin acknowledges, even if he does not fully resolve it.

His creative process is equally revealing. Martin explained that he often finds himself dissatisfied with passages he has written, returning to them with a critical eye and demanding rewrites. Sometimes he abandons one character's perspective to explore another. 'I will open the last chapter I was working on and I'll say, "Oh f***, this is not very good."

And I'll go in and I'll rewrite it,' he disclosed. 'Or I'll decide, "This Tyrion chapter is not coming along, let me write a Jon Snow chapter."' It is a methodology that prioritises quality over speed — a principle admirable in isolation, but increasingly frustrating when applied to a book that has been in development for a decade and a half.

What Martin will not do, he made abundantly clear, is hand the series to a successor should he die before completion. The notion of another author finishing his life's work sits so poorly with him that he invoked Charles Dickens' notorious unfinished final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, as his cautionary reference.

'If that happens, my work won't be finished. It'll be like The Mystery of Edwin Drood,' he said. It is a stance that will terrify fans who have grown accustomed to waiting, and older readers who wonder whether they will live to see the story's conclusion.

Yet Martin has offered genuine plot revelations. Jon Snow, the fan-favourite character allegedly murdered at the end of A Dance with Dragons, could return to the narrative. This mirrors a pivotal divergence from the television series, where the show's ending differed markedly from Martin's apparent intentions.

The author hinted at a darker path forward than the show ultimately chose. 'I don't see a happy ending for Tyrion,' he said. 'His whole arc has been tragic from the first.' He also considered killing Sansa before reconsidering, noting her popularity in the television adaptation might influence his pen.

The Dunk and Egg novella series, meanwhile, has found new life through HBO's A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, with Martin energised to write additional tales in that world. It is a project that, by its nature, proves more tractable and more readily completable than the sprawling complexity of The Winds of Winter.