Brandon Sanderson

Brandon Sanderson's Backstory

Early life

Brandon Winn Sanderson was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on December 19, 1975, the eldest of four children.³ He was a reluctant reader until a teacher gave him Barbara Hambly’s Dragonsbane; he went on to read David Eddings, Melanie Rawn, Robert Jordan, Anne McCaffrey and Orson Scott Card.⁸¹ In 1994 he enrolled at Brigham Young University as a biochemistry major.⁷

Korea and BYU

From 1995 to 1997 he served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Seoul, South Korea, where, by his own account, he realized he missed writing but not chemistry.⁷¹ Back at BYU he switched to English, worked as a hotel clerk, and went on to a master’s degree in creative writing.⁷ Elantris, the sixth novel he wrote, had been with Tor for a year and a half when the publisher made an offer, and it came out in 2005.³¹

Mistborn and the Wheel of Time

Mistborn: The Final Empire followed in 2006.² In December 2007 Harriet McDougal Rigney, Robert Jordan’s widow and editor, chose him to finish Jordan’s Wheel of Time from Jordan’s notes; the work grew into three books, ending with A Memory of Light in January 2013.¹⁶ He topped the New York Times best-seller list with the first two.⁶

The Cosmere

Most of his fantasy novels, including Mistborn, Warbreaker and the planned ten-book Stormlight Archive, which began with The Way of Kings in 2010, share a single universe he calls the Cosmere.⁴² He has also written young-adult and children’s series outside it, among them the Reckoners, Skyward and Alcatraz books.² In 2013 The Emperor’s Soul won the Hugo Award for Best Novella.⁹

Kickstarter and Dragonsteel

In March 2022 he announced that he had written four novels in secret during the pandemic, and his Kickstarter campaign to publish them raised $41.7 million from 185,341 backers, the most of any campaign on the platform.¹⁰¹³ The four books came out in 2023.² In January 2026 Apple TV secured the screen rights to the Cosmere, with Sanderson writing and producing.¹⁵¹⁸

Mistborn: The Final Empire

At a glance