About Gavil

Gavil Cain is the pseudonym of a shy writer of fantasy and science fiction. He is petrified by the smallest possibility of becoming famous, even for five minutes, but he will be very glad to know that someone reads his stories.

Gavil is a Catholic. He loves reading the Bible, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, T.H. White, and Terry Pratchett, and among living authors, J.K. Rowling, Guy Gavriel Kay, G.R.R. Martin, Joe Abercrombie, James S.A. Corey (both of them), Jo Nesbø, Dean Koontz, and many others.

He lives far from the eyes of the world, on a desolate, inaccessible island surrounded by cliffs, waves, and stormy winds. Birds bring him food—mostly the wondrous Morus bassanus—and he obtains water by desalinating the sea, being an engineer by both profession and passion.

He was born in July, on rocky ground, while the winds of war howled in his country. He spent his childhood in a large family, obsessed with a football. For a long time, he lived under the illusion that he would become a football player (much longer than normal boys usually do), and when that dream completely fell apart—utterly—by then already a student, he turned to writing, which he had kept in reserve since his early teenage years.

As a schoolboy, he repeatedly read the second and third Harry Potter books, gifts from his parents to him and his brothers. Those were the only works of fantasy literature he had access to. Around that time, he filled two notebooks with a story about a superhero strikingly similar to Batman, whose animated series he was obsessed with. That now-nameless crime-fighting hero operated by day and wore a white suit. Entirely original, of course. The notebooks were lost and will never be found. Never.

Inspired by Kay’s Lord of Emperors (not knowing it was the second book of a duology), Williams’s tetralogy Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (the first series he read in the correct order), the first Septimus Heap book by Angie Sage (he never got hold of the others), and The Lord of the Rings (the most special books in the world, aside from the Bible), which he discovered in a university library in a big city, he began to study writing more seriously—especially speculative fiction. He discovered Croatian magazines and short story collections published for conventions and decided to submit to their contests. The first few stories were rejected (soundly, one assumes), and then, under the pseudonym Torp Moniantt, he published his first story in 2015—The Death-Bringer in Wet Boots in the SferaKon short story collection Nema što nema (Everything and Anything). To this day, he still worries whether the word “Smrtonoša” (“Death-Bringer”) makes readers think of Harry Potter.

For ten years he wrote under the name Torp Moniantt, publishing fourteen short stories in Croatian genre anthologies and magazines (SferaKon Anthology, FantaSTikon Anthology, Marsonic, Ubiq, and Sirius B). The stories The Triple Mystery of Ballton and The Fall of Shampire won the Artefakt Award. He uses short stories as a way to introduce readers to the worlds of his imagination, to prepare them for what he has in store in his novels—but that completely falls apart if he keeps changing his pseudonyms.

So far, he has written four novels, though none have been published yet (though two came very close). He is currently torn between traditional and self-publishing, watching Morus bassanus soar toward the Atlantic.