George RR Martin is in the dark about 'a lot' of the Game of Thrones finale

Game of Thrones fans anxious to find out how the show will end should take comfort from the fact that George RR Martin is in the same boat.

Although the HBO fantasy series is based on Martin's novels, the author says he has not seen the scripts for the final season. He gave showrunners DB Weiss and David Benioff an outline of how he would like the saga to end, but Martin says the pair will have come up with "a lot" of the final plot "on their own".

“I haven’t read the [final-season] scripts and haven’t been able to visit the set because I’ve been working on Winds,” Martin told Entertainment Weekly (EW), referring to his long-awaited novel The Winds of Winter.

“I know some of the things," he continued. "But there’s a lot of minor-character [arcs] they’ll be coming up with on their own. And, of course, they passed me several years ago. There may be important discrepancies.”

The show has long since overtaken the plot of Martin's books, with the 2015 season adapting the conclusion of his most recent published novel A Dance With Dragons (2011).

Now the author admits he has "mixed feelings" about the fact that the story will come to an end on TV first. "Obviously, I wished I finished these books sooner so the show hadn’t gotten ahead of me," he said. "I never anticipated that.”

After completing The Winds of Winter, Martin still has one more novel in the series to write. The final volume is provisionally titled A Dream of Spring. “It’s the end for a lot of people,” he said. “It’s not the end for me. I’m still deeply in it. I better live a long time because I have a lot of work left to do.”

The eighth and final series of Game of Thrones begins on April 15, and will be broadcast in the UK on Sky Atlantic.