Author Profile · Fantasy & Science Fiction
Brandon Sanderson
b. 1975 · American
Who is Brandon Sanderson?
A Nebraska-born Mormon who wrote thirteen unpublished novels while working a hotel night desk, sold the sixth (Elantris), and then received the genre's most consequential phone call: Harriet McDougal, choosing him to finish Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time from the late author's notes. He delivered, and in parallel built his own Cosmere — an interconnected universe of worlds (Mistborn's ash-falls, Roshar's highstorms) running on the field's most rigorously rule-bound magic; 'Sanderson's Laws' of magic systems are now workshop canon. Famous for a work ethic that borders on the geological (the 2022 'four secret novels' Kickstarter raised $41 million, the largest ever), university lectures given away free online, and endings — the 'Sanderlanche' — engineered like demolitions.
Why they matter
The bestselling epic fantasist of the current era and the architect of the systematised-magic school that dominates it; finishing the Wheel of Time and building the Cosmere made him both the bridge from the Jordan age and the centre of the genre's present commercial gravity.
Essential books — and where to start
Mistborn: The Final Empire
2006 · Mistborn, book 1 · Fantasy · Epic Fantasy, Heroic Fantasy
The prophesied hero failed, the Dark Lord won, and a thousand years later the Lord Ruler's Final Empire runs on ash-falls, skaa slavery and an immortality no rebellion has dented. Enter Kelsier, the only prisoner to escape the Pits of Hathsin, with a thief's solution: assemble a crew, game the aristocracy and steal the empire. His recruit Vin — street urchin, abuse survivor, untrained Mistborn — learns Allomancy, the field's flagship rule-based magic: swallow metals, burn them for powers, with every effect bounded and priced. Heist mechanics, training arcs and a final confrontation that converts theology into ballistics: the Sanderson method, fully operational at first try.
The Way of Kings
2010 · The Stormlight Archive, book 1 · Fantasy · Epic Fantasy
Roshar: a world scoured by highstorms, where wildlife has shells, grass retracts, and war on the Shattered Plains is fought for gemhearts across chasms by armies whose enslaved bridge crews die so cavalry needn't. Kaladin, surgeon's son turned soldier turned slave, carries Bridge Four through a depression rendered with rare honesty toward the oaths that remake him; Shallan pursues scholarship and fraud in the same satchel; Dalinar, the warlord reading a dead king's book, receives visions ordering him to unite a people he helped break. A thousand pages of setup detonated by the genre's most celebrated climax-engineering: the Sanderlanche, demonstrated at full scale.
Series
1931–2009 · American
The gateway epic fantasist for a generation of 1980s–90s readers: the Belgariad's chatty, character-first formula taught millions that doorstop fantasy could be comfort reading, and its fingerprints are on every found-family quest since.
1929–2018 · American
The genre's most honoured writer and its moral centre of gravity: the standard demonstration that SF and fantasy can do everything literature does, plus things only they can.
b. 1974 · British
The defining grimdark author after Martin: Abercrombie perfected the character-voice-driven, blackly comic register that dominates modern adult fantasy, and his fight scenes and moral hangovers are the subgenre's house style.
