Brandon Sanderson

Brandon Sanderson was born in December 1975 in Lincoln, Nebraska. As a child Brandon enjoyed reading, but he lost interest in the types of titles often suggested for him, and by junior high he never cracked a book if he could help it. This all changed in eighth grade when an astute teacher, Mrs. Reader, gave Brandon Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly. Brandon thoroughly enjoyed this book, and went in search of anything similar. He discovered such authors as Robert Jordan, Melanie Rawn, David Eddings, Anne McCaffrey, and Orson Scott Card. Brandon continued to be an avid reader through junior high and high school. He liked epic fantasy so much that he even tried his hand at writing some. His first attempts, he says, were dreadful.

It was in 2003, while Brandon was in the middle of a graduate program at BYU, that he got a call from editor Moshe Feder at Tor, who wanted to buy one of Brandon’s books. Brandon had submitted the manuscript a year and a half earlier, and had almost given up on hearing anything, so he was surprised and delighted to receive the offer. In May 2005 Brandon held his first published novel, Elantris, in his hands. Over the next few years, Tor also published Brandon’s Mistborn trilogy, its followup The Alloy of Law, Warbreaker, and The Way of Kings, the first in a projected ten-volume series called The Stormlight Archive. Other projects continue to be in the works.

In December 2007 Brandon was chosen by Harriet McDougal Rigney to complete Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series after his untimely passing. 2009′s The Gathering Storm and 2010′s Towers of Midnight was followed by the final volume in the series, A Memory of Light, in January 2013. He was twice nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He has hit the New York Times Hardcover Fiction Best-Seller List six times, with his first Wheel of Time book knocking Dan Brown out of the #1 spot and his second dethroning John Grisham. Brandon’s books have been published in over twenty languages.