Jez Cajiao Bio – Dark LitRPG and Fantasy Author

Jez Cajiao was born in 1980 in Hartlepool, UK — yes, that Hartlepool — and raised in Washington, UK, alongside his Mum, Step Dad, two brothers, a sister, and the real boss of the household, Jasper the Rottweiler. School and Jez came to a mutual agreement early on that they weren’t meant for each other, so at the ripe old age of 11, he did the sensible thing and went to work in the family catering business instead.

After years of catering, Jez spread his wings and headed to Greece to work in bars. What happened there? Well, what happens in Greece stays in Greece. Permanently. In a locked vault. Never to be spoken of again.

Dragging himself back to the UK, Jez rejoined the family catering business, worked his way up to management, and eventually ran his own restaurant. It was around this time he made a rather significant personal discovery — he genuinely didn’t like people all that much. Customers are the worst, it turns out. So he pivoted to welding, which he absolutely loved… right up until his lungs staged a full-on rebellion and doctors informed him, in no uncertain terms, that welding would probably kill him. First job he’d truly loved, gone. At 37. Brilliant.

Not one to be defeated by something as minor as near-death, Jez reinvented himself again and opted for a career in computers — significantly less likely to destroy his internal organs — and completed a Diploma in Information Systems at University.

Back in 2013, he met Christine, who would eventually agree to become his wife (still not entirely sure what she was thinking, but we’re grateful). The deal, however, came with a condition: Harry, her Bedlington Terrier, had to approve of Jez — or Jez would have to go. Harry, thankfully, gave the nod. He then went above and beyond by helping Jez propose on a frog-covered rock in the dead of night on a beach in South Shields, and later lent his considerable talents to helping with the wedding invitations for their 2015 marriage. Good lad, Harry.

2017 brought both great joy and great heartbreak, as they received the news of a pregnancy, only to suffer a miscarriage on Independence Day. They were, however, truly blessed with a son in 2018, and a second in 2020 — the two tiny chaos agents who now run the house.

Jez had fallen hard for the LitRPG genre and decided, in 2018, to try his hand at writing. It took him two years to finish his first book — partly because he was working full time, and partly because first-time authors apparently enjoy rewriting the same book eleven thousand times. Once it was done though, he found his people in the LitRPG community, and readers quickly started demanding the next instalment with increasing urgency.

Then 2020 arrived and, thanks to his lung condition putting him at higher risk, Jez was furloughed during the pandemic. Every cloud and all that — he wrote every single day. He’d found it again. That thing he actually loved. By 2021, he’d completed the entire first Season of the UnderVerse series (6 books) and released the first three books of the Rise of Mankind series. Not bad for a lad who hated school.

These days, Jez is happily writing away in his home office in the North East of England, surrounded by his wife Christine, their two sons, three cats, two dogs, two geckos, and — because Christine insisted, and when Christine insists, you listen — twenty chickens. (The chickens were absolutely, entirely the wife’s idea. Jez would like that on record.)