Meet the Author: Travis Baldree

11 November 2025

Travis Baldree is a full-time audiobook narrator who has lent his voice to hundreds of stories. Before that, he spent decades designing and building video games like Torchlight, Rebel Galaxy, and Fate.

Travis is the #1 New York Times Bestselling author of Legends & Lattes, his debut fantasy novel, and its sequel Bookshops & Bonedust, which won the Audies for Best Fantasy Book of 2025. His latest novel, Brigands & Breadknives, is published on 13 November by Tor and is available to borrow from the Catalogul Bibliotecilor Comunitare Suffolk.

What was your first introduction to books and reading? Were you surrounded by books as a child or did you visit a library?

I was surrounded with plenty of books as a child. I’m pretty sure The Silly Book was one of my first favorites. My grandmother was a science teacher and tended to collect castoffs from the school library when it refreshed its shelves, and there was always something within reach. I grew up in a very small town with a limited library, but I never lacked for anything to read.

Care este rutina ta de scris?

Music is usually involved, mostly as a way to give myself some separation from the world. Legends & Lattes was written in my audiobooth where I record daily – another kind of separation. My goal is usually to write a chapter a day until the book is done, but for all sorts of reasons that is often impractical – I still have a full time narration job, and I’m a parent, and the world does tend to intrude, not to mention tours and appearances and obligations for the books I’ve already written. To really get some words down, I tend to book a few days at an AirBnB so that I can’t do any other sort of work, and I try to get down as much as possible.

It’s impossible to discuss your writing career without mentioning Legends & Lattes. Did it surprise you that Legends & Lattes found a huge audience so quickly?

It was an enormous surprise that anyone read it at all!

Ne poți spune puțin despre noua ta carte, Brigands & Breadknives?

Brigands & Breadknives is set shortly after Legends & Lattes, and follows Fern, the rattkin bookseller you may have met in Bookshops & Bonedust. She transplants herself to Thune to reopen her bookshop next to an old friend, and to simultaneously try to fix a growing dissatisfaction with the course of her life. It’s a smashing success, but to her dismay, it doesn’t fix anything at all.

After getting drunk to work up the courage to admit this to Viv, she instead falls asleep in the back of a wagon, and wakes up a day and a half outside of town in the company of a thousand year old elven adventurer and the chaos goblin she is dragging in for a bounty. A road-trip adventure ensues that explores the very real problems of disappointing the people you care about, and learning to say ‘no’.

Legends & Lattes is so loved and invested in by so many people that you could have been forgiven for writing something very similar but in Brigands & Breadknives you have chosen to take your readers on a chaotic journey and there are plenty of action scenes. Was that a conscious decision when you started writing?

I honestly don’t have much interest in writing to template – it’s hard enough to write a book, and I can’t imagine putting the energy into one that I don’t believe in. In the end, I’m just going to have to go where the books take me.

Many readers out there will have their own mental picture of the universe you have created. Do you have an image of a reader in mind as you write or is it more scattergun than that?

I have someone I write for, definitely, and I hope to please that ideal reader.

Do you ever base any of your characters (however loosely!) on people you know?

Not really – certainly they are influenced by the people I have met, but apart from some broad archetypes, I’ve never shaped a character around a real person – with the possible exception of Viv, who is accidentally a lot like me.

Ce urmează pentru tine?

I’m currently working on a very different book outside the Legends & Lattes world in a genre that I narrate a lot of – and have developed strong opinions about – LitRPG. It’s exciting to break new ground.

One book that everyone should read?

Anything by Terry Pratchett.

Ne poți spune un lucru despre tine pe care cititorii tăi s-ar putea să nu-l știe?

I have a large collection of classic computers – I’ve got a lot of affection for old technology.