RR Haywood
British author
Richard Haywood (born 17 May 1975), who writes under the pen name RR Haywood, is one of the UK's bestselling self-published authors.
Most known for the Undead series of post-apocalyptic zombie novels, Haywood has published more than 40 books and is a Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Amazon, and Audible multiple bestselling author with 25 Kindle and Audible bestsellers and nearly four million copies sold worldwide.
His writing spans multiple genres including horror (The Undead), science fiction (the Extracted Trilogy, the DELIO trilogy), thrillers (A Town Called Discovery), and satirical action-adventure (Fiction Land). Haywood's style is marked by a focus on characterisation and gritty realism.
Life and career
Growing up in Birmingham, England, Haywood was a voracious reader from a young age, finding solace in books during what he describes as a "disjointed childhood". He moved with his family to the Isle of Wight aged eight, where he still resides. His favourite authors growing up included J. R. R. Tolkien, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke.
Prior to becoming a full-time author, Haywood was a policeman, joining Hampshire Police in 1998 and being posted to the Isle of Wight, where he was the island's highest arresting officer with an average of 150 arrests per year. Thanks to the success of his writing career, he was able to retire from policing in 2017 after 19 years’ service.
His first book, the novella The Undead Day One, was self-published in 2012.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q124128948. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1975, 1998, 2017 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “RR Haywood” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.