Winds of Winter release date: George RR Martin hints Game of Thrones sequel probably won't come in 2018

The author continues to work on Westerosi encyclopaedia Fire and Blood

A Song of Ice and Fire author George RR Martin (HBO)

For George RR Martin fans, the long wait between A Dance with Dragons and The Winds of Winter has been excruciating, the fate of Jon Snow remaining unknown for book readers (although HBO’s adaptation has already answered that conundrum).

The author first said the upcoming novel should take “three years to finish” — comments that date back to 2011. However, soon after Martin assured fans that Winds of Winter would be “done when it's done”, tempering some expectations.

Replying to fans on his blog, Not A Blog, Martin said work continues on the fictional Westerosi encyclopaedia Fire and Blood, the first volume of which will come before The Winds of Winter.

"F&B will be in two volumes,” he wrote to one fan, “Volume One before [The Winds of Winter], Volume Two after."

Writing on his blog in January last year, Martin wrote: “Not done yet, but I’ve made progress. But not as much as I hoped a year ago when I thought to be done by now. I think it will be out this year. (But hey, I thought the same thing last year.)”

Speaking about the book’s content in 2016, Martin said: “There are a lot of dark chapters right now in the book that I’m writing. It is called The Winds of Winter, and I’ve been telling you for 20 years that winter was coming.

“Winter is the time when things die, and cold and ice and darkness fill the world, so this is not going to be the happy feel-good that people may be hoping for. Some of the characters [are] in very dark places.

“In any story, the classic structure is, ‘Things get worse before they get better,’ so things are getting worse for a lot of people.”

Meanwhile, work on the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones has been pushing on, working with unpublished details from the final A Song of Ice and Fire instalment A Dream of Spring.