Who am I?
I’m Connor Sanders; writer, worldbuilder, and Keeper of the Anshar.
Writing has always been my greatest ambition. I wrote my first story in primary school, continued writing throughout my teenage years and finally returned to it in my mid-20's. It has always been my dream to be able to earn a living from writing and become a full-time author.
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From my formative years, I’ve been drawn towards the liminal spaces of the universe. Whether that be the fraying boundaries at the borders of dimensions where the laws of reality falter, or the vast gulfs between stars where no light touches. I have sought to bring to the page the horrors that stir not only in the far reaches of the cosmos, but in the depths of the unconscious self.
Throughout my life, I have devoured fantasy, horror, and science fiction alike. What I offer to you now is some unholy alloy of the three.
I was born in Staffordshire, and went on to study Medieval History at the University of York, completing both my BA and MA there. Following that, I went on to earn a Postgraduate Diploma in Education at Birmingham City University, working for a while as a secondary school History and Philosophy teacher before moving into environmental conservation.
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Along the way, I became a DM for D&D 5e, building homebrew worlds where my friends adventured and endured countless miseries. Somwhere in this journey, I realised I didn’t just want to build stories for the table; I wanted to take them seriously, to bring the worlds in my head fully to life on the page.
That love for storytelling is what eventually gave birth to the Anshar.
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About the Anshar
The Anshar is the setting for all my current fiction: a sealed-off corner of existence, a wounded cosmos where cruel gods rule and suppress, but individual memory resists. My stories are shaped by its broken timelines, dying faiths, and the lingering echoes of things long forgotten.
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It’s not the whole universe, just a part that was cut away.
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Millennia ago, a being known as the Starwalker ripped the Anshar from the wider cosmos, enclosing it within the Astral Veil, a divine boundary separating it from the Kurkalla, a realm of roiling chaos beyond. Inside this sealed space, life may flourish without fearing the horrors that lie beyond its sacred boundaries.
The Stories I Tell
The Anshar isn’t just a single world, it’s a whole sealed area of spacetime, comprising solar systems, planets, ruins, and realms, each bearing the scars of forgotten wars, divine interference, and ancient rebellion.
It is a realm of sacred contradictions; ruled by gods, but shaped by its inhabitants. Within its star-choked expanse, you'll find empires forged in holy fire, jungles alive with spirit-song, and cities built atop the bones of civilisations long since buried. It is a place where timelines fracture and history is used as a weapon; where even the gods fear what might be remembered.
This is the backdrop for my stories: tales of grief, resistance, and remembrance in worlds that were never meant to endure.
The heart of it all begins in Caverns of the Cosmos, Book I of the Anshar - a story of resistance and futility, delving into the forgotten depths and celestial machinery of a planet named Vurunuus. Alongside it, I’m building two short story anthologies: Whispers and Sins: Tales from the Anshar, and Embers and Edicts: The Aunari Codex; collections that explore lost rituals, divine decrees, and the ordinary people caught in the slow collapse of a wounded cosmos.
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