Terry Brooks

Terry Brooks (born 1944) is an American fantasy writer, author of the long-running Shannara series, whose debut The Sword of Shannara (1977) was the first fantasy novel to reach the New York Times trade paperback best-seller list. He was born Terence Dean Brooks in Sterling, Illinois, on 8 January 1944.

He studied English literature at Hamilton College, graduating in 1966, and took a law degree at Washington and Lee University, practising as an attorney before writing full time. Ballantine used The Sword of Shannara to launch its new Del Rey imprint, edited by Lester del Rey, and the book sold roughly 125,000 copies in its first year. Sequels included The Elfstones of Shannara (1982) and The Wishsong of Shannara (1985). He began the comic Landover series with Magic Kingdom for Sale, Sold! (1986), wrote the Word and Void trilogy beginning with Running with the Demon (1997), and wrote the novelisation of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999). He has had 23 New York Times best sellers and received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2017. In March 2025 he announced a partial retirement.

For collectors, The Sword of Shannara is the key book. It was released in 1977 simultaneously as a Random House hardback and a Ballantine trade paperback, with cover art by the Brothers Hildebrandt, who had previously illustrated Tolkien. Wikipedia gives ISBN 0-345-24804-X for the Ballantine first edition and 0-394-41333-4 for the Random House hardback, so both formats have a claim to first-edition status.