THE WRITE DEAN
Official Website of author, Leighton Dean
About
LEIGHTON DEAN
Leighton Dean is a Welsh author of dark, genre-bending fiction with five books to his name. From the political cyberpunk streets of Kingdom United in GunBoy, to the deep-space horror of Save Our Souls, and the weird west mythology of the Gods & Vagrants trilogy — his work puts flawed, complex characters at the heart of uncompromising stories.
Born in Carmarthen and raised in Llanelli — a proud industrial town on the South Wales coast, still in the shadow of its steelworks — Dean's creative world was shaped early. A handcrafted wooden fort at his grandparents', drowning in varnish, doors that stuck but were worth the effort. A sprawling Star Wars snowscape his father built from newspaper, egg cartons, and what felt like a litre of Artex. Science fiction at home. Westerns at his grandparents'. Both still show up in everything he writes.
His wife calls him an encyclopaedia of science fiction — and she's not wrong. He was obsessed long before The Matrix made it cool. He's read Dune more times than is probably healthy. James Herbert's Domain did something to him he's never quite recovered from. His influences run from Evil Dead to Oldboy, Ghost in the Shell to Mississippi Burning.
Dean has tinnitus, so he's never writing in silence. His soundtrack is almost always film and game scores — Hans Zimmer, Marc Beltrami, Henry Jackman — or 65daysofstatic, a band he loves unreasonably and loudly.
GunBoy remains his proudest achievement — not just because of what it is, but because of what finishing it proved. He hadn't grasped how hard it would be. Now he has five books and knows exactly how hard it is, which hasn't stopped him.
Leighton lives in Southwest Wales with his wife and their golden retriever. When he's not writing, you'll find him deep in an RPG, losing at strategy games, making AI art, or attempting to find balance on a yoga mat. He and his wife once spent three weeks in Los Angeles checking out movie locations — including standing outside Doc Brown's house on the exact day Back to the Future Part II had predicted the future would arrive.
Travel is always a recharge — a way to step away from screens, notifications, and the particular black hole of TikTok, and remember why stories matter in the first place.