Fantasy authors

Christopher Paolini
Christopher Paolini was born on the 17th November 1983 in Southern California. His best known works include Eragon and Eldest, both part of the Inheritance Cycle. Paolini's childhood was spent in the Paradise Valley of Montana. Christopher was taught at home and passed his accredited correspondence courses at the age of 15. Following his graduation he began writing the novels that would go on to become Eragon and Eldest.

CS Lewis
C.S. (Clive Staples) Lewis, also known as Jack was born in the Northern Irish town of Belfast in 1898. He was one of two boys born to his father Albert J. Lewis and his mother Florence Augusta Hamilton Lewis, his brother Warren Hamilton Lewis was born in 1895. His upbringing was comfortable and the library of the family home was full of books that the young Lewis enjoyed reading. CS Lewis endured as difficult as year as can be imaged when, in 1908, his mother, father and brother all died.

David Eddings
David Eddings is an American born author best know for his epic fantasy novels. The Belgariad and the Mallorean are his most loved works and two characters in particular; Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress have entered into fantasy folklore.

David Farland
David Farland, an American author of fantasy fiction, is the pseudonym of Dave Wolverton. Dave Wolverton, who is well known as an author of science fiction, lives in Utah with his wife and five children.

David Gemmell
David Gemmell was born in 1948 in West London, England. His school life ended at the age of sixteen when he was expelled for his part in an organized gambling syndicate. After leaving school Gemmell became a labourer in the daytime and a bouncer at night in the pubs and clubs of London.

Erin Hunter
Erin Hunter does not, in reality, exist. She is the pen name of three authors and an editor who work together to write fantasy books, most notably the Warriors series.

Garth Nix
Nix was born in 1963 in Melbourne, Australia, and spent his childhood in Canberra. Before attended the University of Canberra from 1984-1986 he spent time travelling in the UK. Emerging in 1986 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in professional writing, Nix soon became heavily involved in the publishing industry after moving to Sydney, working his way up the corporate ladder until finally becoming a senior editor in 1991 with HarperCollins Australia.

George RR Martin
Born on the 20th September 1948, George Raymond Richard Martin began writing at a very early age; creating scary monster stories and selling them to the other children that lived in the neighbouring area. He had his first book published in 1971; the book was called The Hero and Martin was 21 years of age.

George Udenkwo
The author, George Chyke Udenkwo, was born in 1967 in the troubled town of Newry, Northern Ireland. Half Nigerian, half Irish, he was raised in 70's England and to his everlasting chagrin missed out on the Punk era by a hairs breadth. "We left for Nigeria in '76, anarchy was just over the British horizon and art was about to change forever." But Nigeria was to reshape George's views in other ways. "You'd wake up one morning and the entire government had changed overnight, you knew the government had changed because all the TV stations were broadcasting the national anthem on a tape-loop. You very quickly had to forget the last Government ever existed."

Back in England he tried his hand at various jobs before settling on martial arts and weight training as a way to finance a series of underground movies that never quite saw the light of day.

He kept writing; novels, short stories, scripts and weird poems on his kitchen wall. Of his work, George says, "In the Golgotha Falls series I suggest that technology will not bring universal meaning, but rather fragment our understanding of reality further. Through genetic engineering and quantum science we summon our most virulent nightmares, not wittingly, but disguised as solutions and labour-saving marvels. In the end humanity winds up with a Swiss cheese reality that bears closer resemblance to Alice in Wonderland than the utopian world we envisage today.

Glen Cook
Glen Cook first began writing in high school, providing the occasional article for the school newspaper. After high school Cook spent time in United States Navy before working full time at a General Motors assembly plant. It was while he was at GM that Cook began writing in earnest, producing as many as three books a year. Outside of writing Glen Cook is an avid stamp collector and enjoys watching the Cardinals play baseball.

Guy Gavriel Kay
Guy Gavriel Kay was born on the 7th November 1954 in Canada. He is still based out of Toronto. At the beginning of his career Gavriel Kay aided Christopher Tolkien (J.R.R. Tolkien's son) in the editing of Tolkien's great work, The Silmarillion. The pair met when at university together in Manitoba.

JK Rowling
Joanne Rowling, better known and indeed, EXTREMELY well known around the world as JK Rowling was born in the town of Yate, South Gloucestershire in 1965. She is the most successful literary author of all time and her world-famous Harry Potter series has so far sold a staggering 380,000,000 copies worldwide and has been translated into over sixty different languages.

Joe Abercrombie
Joe Abercrombie was born in the famous English town of Lancaster, England, on the 31st of December 1974. He was educated at Lancaster Royal Grammar School before studying Psychology at Manchester University. Joe Abercrombie then moved to London, finding work at a TV Post-Production company. Two years later he left to become a freelance film editor, and worked documentaries, awards shows, music videos, and concerts for artists ranging from Barry White to Coldplay.

JRR Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien was born on the 3rd January 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa. He served in the First World War as a second lieutenant before coming down with trench fever at the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

Margaret Weis
Margaret Weis was born on the 16th March 1948 in Independence, Missouri and is a New York Times best-selling author of fantasy books. Missouri in the 1950s was not an ideal setting for a budding young fantasy author but the young Weis was not to be deterred and enthralled her kindergarten friends and then her classmates in school with her stories.

Margit Sandemo
Margit Sandemo is Scandinavia’s most popular author. Her flagship multi?volume fantasy?historical saga The Legend of the Ice People, now about to be published in English for the first time, has made her something of a living legend among writers because it alone has sold 25 million copies in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe.

Marion Zimmer Bradley
Marion Zimmer Bradley was born on the 3rd June 1930 and sadly died in 1999. She was an American science fiction and fantasy author who was well known for the feminist and Christian themes within her books. Her most famous piece of work is probably The Mists of Avalon, which was in essence a retelling of an Arthurian legend from the female perspective and her Darkover novels.

Mark Anthony Tierno
Mark Anthony Tierno lives in Monrovia, California and is a lifelong fantasy and Sci-Fi reader. Mark completed his first novel Maldene in 1996, a novel that was finally published in 2006 following ten years of agent rejections.

Michelle Paver
Michelle Paver is a novelist that is best known for the six books that make up The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness. She was born in 1960 in Malawi (then known as Nyasaland) to a South African father and a Belgian mother. Her father ran and wrote for the local Nyasaland Times whilst her mother contributed the gossip column.

Patricia McKillip
Patricia Anne McKillip was born on the 29th February (a leap year), 1948 in Salem, Oregon. The sea coast of Oregon instilled a great love of the sea and the cliffs and she likes nothing more than walking along the beach and admiring the views. McKillip grew up as part of a very strong family, full of love and support. Her father was an Air Force officer and Patricia found herself living with her family in Germany and England between 1958 and 1962 and this gave her an insight into the outside world and their cultures and languages, elements of which she has incorporated into her fantasy novels.

Philip Pullman
Philip Pullman was born on the 19th October, 1946 in Norwich, England. Pullman is best known for the series of books entitled His Dark Materials, the award winning children’s literature consisting of Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass.

RA Salvatore
Robert Anthony Salvatore was born in Leominster, Massachusetts on January 20, 1959. A graduate of Leominster High School, Salvatore attended Fitchburg State College to study computerscience, however, he changed his major to journelism after recieving a copy of The Lord of the Rings as a Christmas gift.

Raymond E Feist
Raymond E. Feist (the E. stands for Elias) was born in Los Angeles, California in the year that the Second World War ended (1945). Feist was born with the surname Gonzales but was subsequently adopted by Felix E. Feist and took the Feist surname for his own.

Robert Jordan
Robert Jordan was born on the 17th of October 1948 in Charleston, South Carolina. In 2006 he was diagnosed with the rare blood disease amyloidosis and died on September the 16th, 2007. Jordan will be best remembered for his best-selling fantasy series, The Wheel of Time, with 14 million copies having been sold in North America alone.

Robert Stanek
Robert Stanek was born on the 3rd January 1966 in Burlington, Wisconsin in the United States of America. His father emigrated to the U.S.A. from Budapest in Hungary.

Robin Hobb
Robin Hobb, real name Margaret Astrid Lindholm Ogden, was born in 1952 in California. She uses the pen name of Robin Hobb due to unsatisfactory sales when writing under the name of Megan Lindholm.

Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams
Roderick Gordon was born, grew up and went to university in London. He worked in corporate finance in the City until 2001. He counts a number of writers and poets among his ancestors such RD Blackmore, Philip Doddridge and Matthew Arnold plus two paleontologists and celebrated eccentrics, William and Frank Buckland. He recently moved with his family from London to north Norfolk.

Roger Zelazny
Roger Joseph Zelazny was born in Ohio on May the 13th, 1937. Zelazny's most celebrated fantasy works are The Amber Chronicles. He has inspired younger fantasy writers, with George R. R. Martin and Neil Gaiman being heavily influenced by his work.

Stephen Donaldson
Stephen R. Donaldson was born on the 13th May 1947 in Cleveland, Ohio. His father, James, was a medical missionary and his mother, Ruth, a prosthetist (a person skilled in making or fitting prosthetic devices). Donaldson spent the years between the ages of 3 and 16 living in India where his father was working as an orthopaedic surgeon. Donaldson was educated at the College of Wooster and the Kent State University, being awarded a Bachelor's and Master's degree respectively. Stephen Donaldson's work is heavily influenced by other fantasy authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien, Roger Zelazny, Joseph Conrad, Henry James and William Faulkner. Stephen Donaldson currently lives in New Mexico.

Stephen King
Stephen King, the American author of horror and fantasy books was born in Portland in 1947. His first writing steps were taken when attending the University of Maine, he wrote a column for the school's newspaper.

Steven Erikson
Steven Erikson was born on the 7th October 1959 in Toronto, Canada. Erikson is his writing name, his real name being Steve Rune Lundin. Educated in Canada, he trained in both archaeology and anthropology before graduating from the acclaimed Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Steven Erikson has a wife and son; they spent a fair part of their lives living in Great Britain before once again returning to his native Canada and the city of Winnipeg.

Susanna Clarke
Susanna Clarke was born in Nottingham, England in 1959, a Methodist Minister’s eldest daughter. Oxford educated (philosophy, politics and economics at St Hilda’s College), she is best known (so far) for her award winning novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which was published in 2004.

Tad Williams
Tad Williams is a Californian born author of fantasy novels. He grew up around Stanford University in a town called Palo Alto and was encouraged to be creative by his parents.

Terry Goodkind
Terry Goodkind was born in 1948 and raised in Nebraska in the United States. Goodkind, slightly unusually for an author, suffers from dyslexia. He worked as a carpenter and a rare artifact restorer and painted some beautiful marine and wildlife paintings.

Terry Pratchett
The English fantasy author, Terry D. J. (David John) Pratchett was born on the 28th April 1948 in the town of Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. His was educated at High Wycombe Technical High School.

Trudi Canavan
Trudi Canavan was born on the 23rd October 1969 in Melbourne, Australia. She won the Aurealis Award for her fantasy short story Whispers of the Mist Children in 1999 and has never looked back. In 2001 she further established herself as a fantasy writer of rare talent with The Magician's Guild, the first book in a trilogy which included The Novice and The High Lord.

Ursula Le Guin
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born on the 21st October 1921 in California and is an American author of novels, poetry and short stories. She has won numerous awards during her distinguished career, notably the Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master award in 2003.

William Horwood
William Horwood is an English author born in Oxford on the 12th of May 1944. The works for which he is best known are the best-selling Duncton Mole trilogies and the sequels to Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.