He graduated from Kearney State College in 1973 with BA in Art and then went on to enroll in Northern Baptist Theological Seminary.
During this time Lawhead also enrolled in a number of writing courses at nearby Wheaton College.
His professional writing career began with five busy years as an editor and staff writer for Campus Life magazine.
In 1986, he moved to Oxford, England, to do research for The Pendragon Cycle, a reinterpretation of the legend of King Arthur in a Celtic setting combined with elements of Atlantis.
[5] The first book in the series, Taliesin, won the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association's Gold Medallion Award for Fiction in 1988.
[8] In 2008, the second book in the trilogy, Scarlet, won a Christy Award in the category of Visionary Fiction.