George R.R. Martin sold his first story in 1971 and has been writing professionally ever since. He has written fantasy, horror, and science fiction, and for his sins spent ten years in Hollywood as a writer/producer, working on Twilight Zone, Beauty and the Beast, and various feature films and television pilots that were never made. In the mid 90s he returned to prose, his first love, and began work on his epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire. He has been in the Seven Kingdoms ever since. Whenever he's allowed to leave, he returns to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives with the lovely Parris, a big white dog called Mischa, and two cats named Augustus and Caligula who think they run the place.

A Feast for Crows is the fourth of seven planned novels in A Song of Ice and Fire, an epic fantasy series by American author George R. R. Martin. The novel was first published on October 17 2005 in the United Kingdom, with a United States edition following on November 8 2005; however, it appeared ahead of the publication date in several UK bookshops. Its publication was preceded by a novella named Arms of the Kraken, which collected the first four Iron Islands chapters together. Arms of the Kraken was published in the August 2002 edition of Dragon Magazine. Another chapbook featuring three Daenerys chapters was published for BookExpo 2005, although these chapters were subsequently moved into the fifth volume, A Dance with Dragons.

Like its predecessor A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, one of the two most prestigious awards in science fiction and fantasy publishing, although it lost out the 2006 ballot to Robert Charles Wilson's Spin. A Feast for Crows was also the first novel in the sequence to debut at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, a feat among fantasy writers only previously achieved by David Eddings, Robert Jordan and Neil Gaiman.

Due to complexities that arose during the writing process, A Feast for Crows only includes some of the POV characters from the past novels, as well as some new characters who appear only briefly. The remaining characters return in A Dance with Dragons, the fifth book