The Winds of Winter Update: George RR Martin Hits Grim 20-Year Milestone for TWOW Amid Total Radio Silence

George RR Martin has now gone 20 years without delivering The Winds of Winter, the long-promised sixth novel in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, leaving readers worldwide still waiting in 2025 for a book first teased in 2006 and trailed through countless blog updates, hints and half-measures.

Martin's epic saga began at a fairly brisk pace by fantasy standards. A Game of Thrones arrived in 1996, followed by A Clash of Kings in 1999 and A Storm of Swords in 2000, each bigger and bloodier than the last. The rhythm faltered with A Feast for Crows, which took five years and landed in 2005, and then again with the 2011 release of A Dance with Dragons. Since then, for more than a decade, there has been no new mainline instalment, only the hovering promise of The Winds of Winter somewhere on the horizon.

Martin started talking publicly about that book as early as March 2006, when he casually laid out the roadmap: A Dance with Dragons, then The Winds of Winter, then A Dream of Spring. He even joked that the final two 'shouldn't take me long,' a line that has aged about as well as any optimistic timeline in fantasy history. By September that year he was already hedging, warning there was 'no way to project a firm publication date' and suggesting other companion books would likely appear before The Winds of Winter ever did.

Moving But Never Arrived

Martin has not been hiding. He has been visibly working, just not in the straight line some fans want. Alongside supervising HBO adaptations and sparring, at times, with their creative direction, he has poured energy into novellas, side projects and the sprawling history and lore of Westeros.

The frustrating thing for readers is that The Winds of Winter has often sounded tantalisingly real. In June 2010 he announced that A Dance with Dragons had just 'got a little shorter' because he was shifting two completed Arianne Martell chapters into The Winds of Winter, bringing that book's finished total to four chapters. A month later he said he had written 'more than a hundred pages' of the new volume. By May 2011 he was speaking openly about chapters being shuffled between books, explaining that editors had moved material back into The Winds of Winter to keep Dance from ballooning to 1,700 pages.

The effect of all this has been oddly spectral. Chapters for The Winds of Winter clearly exist; they just refuse to coalesce into a published whole. Martin himself started referring to the book as 'Son of Kong,' the oversized beast lurking behind other commitments. In June 2012 he admitted there was 'lots to do.' By January 2013 he was back on his blog with another sample chapter and a blunt confession that he still had 'a lot more writing to do' on the novel, alongside 'half a dozen other projects.'

Every so often, he tried to manage expectations more directly. In March 2013 he advised restless readers to discover Maurice Druon's medieval series The Accursed Kings while they were 'waiting (and waiting, and waiting)' for him to finish The Winds of Winter. A 2015 post stripped away any sugar-coating: 'The Winds of Winter did not come out in 2014, as some of you noticed.'

Teasers and Total Silence

If this were simply a case of an author missing dates, the irritation would probably have faded. What has kept the saga alive is the steady drip of teasers that both appease and torment. Across the last decade Martin has repeatedly dangled sample chapters, often as holiday gifts or to coincide with Game of Thrones seasons. In December 2011 he posted an unpublished chapter from The Winds of Winter on his website and promised another at the back of the Dance paperback. In March 2014 a fresh sample chapter generated so much traffic that his site servers crashed.

He has been oddly candid about how long some of this material has sat in his files. That 2014 chapter, he revealed, had 'quite a history,' originating more than a decade earlier as an Arya Stark chapter meant for a now-abandoned five-year time jump, then moved between A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons before finally being parked in The Winds of Winter. Other snippets, such as the Alayne chapter posted in April 2015 after 'howling' from fans and pressure from his Bantam editor, were released with the air of a weary parent handing over sweets.

At the same time, Martin has tried to swat away wild speculation. When online rumours suggested a '12 Days' promotion would end with a surprise Winds announcement in December 2014, he responded flatly: 'Sorry. Not true. I am still working on WINDS. When it's done, I will announce it here.' There has been no such announcement. In recent years, the updates have thinned to almost nothing, leaving what had been an over-communicated delay to harden into near-total radio silence.