From the age of three, Geraint Jones had one constant companion: a book. There’s even a photograph of him on the potty, absorbed in a story, showing his fascination at a young age. Every school assignment, every scribbled homework, somehow turned into a tale of conflict and courage. His school reports noted – much to his teachers’ displeasure – his keen interest in war, and soldiers’ stories.
Jones joined the Territorial Army at 17, and deployed for the first time in 2006, books in hand. He started plotting his own novel whilst in Iraq, scribbling ideas into a journal between patrols and guard duties. Writing became a thread of control in uncontrollable circumstances, a way to process the world around him. “I could see a lot of similarities between the coalition’s situation in Iraq, and the Roman army in Europe two thousand years earlier.” Three years later, in Afghanistan, Geraint read Sharpe whilst under fire. “His war seemed a lot more interesting than mine.” he explains. “That is to say that my own experiences never quite lived up to what I had read in books.”
Jones’s own work has since been published around the world, making the New York Times and Sunday Times bestsellers lists. He loves writing fiction, but his most meaningful projects – including Voices of Victory and D-Day: The Unheard Tapes – are those where he feels a duty to preserve others’ experiences. Every book is a moral obligation to the soldiers whose stories might otherwise be forgotten. He even slips vignettes of real people into his fiction, ensuring history is remembered even when the audience doesn’t realise it. “If I get something remembrance-focused into a project, it doesn’t matter what I got back – someone remembers, someone learns, it’s worth it,” he says.
But the work carries its costs. Nightmares creep in, not his own but drawn from the lives he records. “It sounds weird, but when I’m researching different accounts, I get nightmares that aren’t mine. They’re other people’s experiences. I think it’s probably my reaction to knowing how much these people suffered, being unable to do anything about that, and knowing that it’s still happening to people now, and will continue to happen.”
Yet even with the weight of his own experiences, Jones retains humor and wonder and marvels at the everyday. “When you read the letters and diaries of soldiers who didn’t come home, you realise what really mattered to them. It’s not politics, or these great heroic myths. It’s time with family, and friends. Time in nature. Creation, not destruction.”
Above all, Jones writes with purpose. He hopes young people reading his work might pause and question what they’re choosing to fight for. His books are carefully curated, embedding moral reflection into gripping stories, showing both the heroism and the futility of war. “We need an army,” he says, “but we also need more nice people in the world. Stories help with that.” And when he considers the wider impact, he is clear: “I hope a young person will read this and say no – I don’t want to fight for pointless reasons that aren’t morally right.”
Jones’s life has been a study in contradictions: obsessed with war stories yet grown to disagree with the current state of conflict, a soldier yet a storyteller, disciplined yet playful. His work preserves memory while questioning myth, recording the human cost of conflict without glorifying it. The books he writes, whether fiction or non-fiction, carry the voices of those who have seen the worst, reframed for readers who may never witness it at all.
“All writing should be geared towards promoting a more positive world,” he says. And perhaps that is the quiet strength of Geraint Jones: he loved war, studied it obsessively, lived it in its rawest form – and now, through his words, he channels that passion into ever-lasting recounts for generations to come.