Last week, a leak hit the internet that made a claim that felt almost too good to be true: that George R.R. Martin had finished The Winds of Winter, his long-awaited sixth A Song of Ice and Fire book, and was working with his publisher on a plan to release it this year. Now, Martin's publisher, Bantam, has weighed in, and it's about what we expected.
In response to this leak taking on a life of its own, the folks over at Entertainment Weekly reached out to Bantam directly to ask whether there was any truth to it. Alas, there is not.
"The online chatter you are seeing regarding a supposed leak is false," a representative from Bantam Books told EW.
Did any of us truly expect anything else? While it would have been wonderful if The Winds of Winter was actually completed and turned in, Martin has long said that he would announce when the book is finished on his blog first, directly to his fans, just as he did with A Dance with Dragons. For that information to leak in this way, on 4Chan of all places, was as unlikely as it gets.
Could The Winds of Winter still be finished in 2026?
So there we have it; the leak was bad. But there are still some interesting things to come out of these shenanigans. The biggest to my mind is that it seems like we just got soft confirmation that Bantam Books will indeed still be publishing The Winds of Winter, whenever it is finally turned in. In my breakdown of the leak, I speculated about how Martin's publishers seemed to be shifting their view of how they handled his Westeros books, because printings of A Song of Ice and Fire are now done by a sister imprint of Bantam's, called Random House Worlds. That's significant because Random House Worlds deals specifically in media franchises — think tie-in novels for Stranger Things or Star Wars. It could mean that the overall publishing company, Penguin Random House, was moving toward viewing Martin's Westeros books more as a mega-franchise that capitalized on pre-existing material than as a series that was still viably releasing new, original books.
This shift from Bantam to Random House Worlds has been mixed so far. It brought us a set of beautiful new paperbacks for A Song of Ice and Fire, as well as the divisive illustrated edition of A Feast for Crows, which drew accusations of AI-use for its artwork last year. Even when those were seemingly debunked by the book's artist, Jeffrey R. McDonald, he tellingly still highlights how the book had very tight deadlines for its artwork, which seems somewhat unusual if the publisher was hoping for the book to match the high quality of the previous three illustrated editions released by Bantam.
Since EW got this confirmation from Bantam Books, that points to them being the lead still on The Winds of Winter, and new A Song of Ice and Fire material as a whole. From where I'm sitting, that's a good thing, since they've so far shephered the series well throughout its lifetime.
As for The Winds of Winter, Martin is presumably still hard at work on the novel. And while this leak was false, I still feel a strange sense of hope that we may hear good news from the author at some point this year. Between new seasons of multiple Game of Thrones spinoffs on HBO, the debut of The Mad King stage play, and multiple important anniversaries for the series, it just feels like a banner year for Westeros is unfurling.
Only time will tell. Until then, our watch continues.
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