Orson Scott Card
Ender's Game is one of the most widely read SF novels ever published — a recruiting text for the genre itself, taught in schools and military academies alike — and its sequel's compassionate alien-understanding remains a…
Children's & YA Fantasy
Fantasy written for younger readers that frequently conquers the adult bestseller lists while it's at it.
The authors (13)
David Eddings
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…
Neil Gaiman
The defining mythic fantasist of his generation: Sandman legitimised comics as literature, American Gods codified the gods-among-us novel, and his fairy-tale register shaped two decades of fantasy, YA and screen storytelling.
Diana Wynne Jones
The bridge between the Inklings and modern fantasy's craft: her deconstructions anticipated and outwitted the genre's clichés decades before 'subversion' became a selling point, and her influence runs through Rowling's…
Ursula K. Le Guin
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.
C. S. Lewis
Narnia is one of fantasy's two great gateway drugs (the other being The Hobbit) and the model for every portal fantasy since; with Tolkien, Lewis made Oxford the unlikely engine room of the modern fantastic.
Andre Norton
Quietly one of the most influential figures in the field: she trained the readership.
Terry Pratchett
The most beloved British writer of his generation and comic fantasy's permanent summit: Discworld proved a fantasy series could be a complete satirical instrument, and characters like Vimes, Granny Weatherwax and DEATH have…
Philip Pullman
His Dark Materials raised the ceiling of children's fantasy permanently — Carnegie Medal, Whitbread Book of the Year (the first children's book to win it), and the proof that a bestselling YA epic could carry Milton, Blake and…
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter is the bestselling book series ever written and the single largest recruitment event in the history of reading: whatever the field's arguments about craft or author, modern fantasy's mass audience was…
Brandon Sanderson
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…
J. R. R. Tolkien
The founder of modern fantasy as a publishing category and a worldbuilding discipline: the maps, the appendices, the invented languages, the trilogy format and the entire epic-quest architecture descend from him.
T. H. White
The Once and Future King fixed the modern image of Arthur, Merlyn and Camelot, fed directly into Disney's Sword in the Stone and the musical Camelot, and taught later fantasists — Gaiman and Rowling included — that whimsy and…
Essential books, oldest first (15)
The Hobbit
The gateway to modern fantasy — perhaps a hundred million copies — whose unexpected demand for a sequel produced The Lord of the Rings; Peter Jackson's trilogy stretched it to cinematic breaking…
The Sword in the Stone
The twentieth century's most beloved Arthurian opening, source of Disney's 1963 film, and the template for the 'magical education' subgenre that Rowling industrialised.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
One of the bestselling books ever written and the archetypal portal fantasy: the wardrobe is now a load-bearing structure of the entire genre, and the BBC and Disney adaptations renewed its…
Star Man's Son
The novel that recruited a generation into SF (ask any writer who was twelve in the 1950s-70s) and set the template for YA post-apocalypse decades before the boom.
A Wizard of Earthsea
One of fantasy's foundational texts: the wizard-school template Rowling inherited, the equilibrium-based magic system half the genre uses, and a Jungian moral architecture that still distinguishes…
Charmed Life
Guardian Award winner and the launch of Chrestomanci: the wittiest of the great British children's fantasy sequences and a visible ancestor of the boarding-school-magic boom that followed two…
The White Dragon
One of the first SF hardcovers ever to reach the New York Times bestseller list, announcing that the genre's readership had become a mass market — with a woman at the front of it.
Pawn of Prophecy
The launch of the Belgariad, the defining gateway epic of the 1980s: for an entire readership cohort, this — not Tolkien — was the first fat fantasy, and its conversational template echoes through…
Ender's Game
Hugo and Nebula winner, one of the bestselling SF novels ever, on official reading lists from secondary schools to the US Marine Corps; filmed in 2013.
Fire and Hemlock
A cult masterpiece of mythic YA — the standard against which Tam Lin retellings are measured — and the Jones novel writers (Gaiman included) most often name when asked what the form can do.
Howl's Moving Castle
Jones's best-known book worldwide thanks to Miyazaki's Oscar-nominated 2004 film — which she enjoyed while noting it was someone else's story — and a permanent fixture of comfort-fantasy canons.
Northern Lights
Carnegie Medal winner, later voted the 'Carnegie of Carnegies' — the public's favourite winner in the medal's history — and the launch of the trilogy that made children's fantasy a battleground of…
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
The bestselling opening volume in publishing history and the recruitment event for a global reading generation: whatever else is said (and everything has been), the modern mass audience for…
The Amber Spyglass
Whitbread Book of the Year 2001 — the first children's book ever to take the overall prize — and the most theologically audacious bestseller in the YA canon; the trilogy's capstone and lightning…
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
The fastest-selling book in history at release (roughly fifteen million copies in twenty-four hours) and the conclusion that secured the series' canonical arc; filmed as the franchise's two-part…