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Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
With over 12 million books in print, Terry Brooks has been a seminal force in fantasy fiction for the past twenty years. When his first book, The Sword of Shannara, was published in 1977, it earned Brooks a legion of fans and the novel made publishing history by becoming the first work of fiction to appear on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list. Since then, Brooks has written twelve additional bestselling books. This year, Brooks is celebrating twenty years of continued success by taking his writing to a new level; Running with the Demon is a stunning contemporary fantasy, a page-turner with sleek, spare writing and a dark vision not found in his earlier work.
After twenty years writing epic adventure fantasy, Brooks is very excited about doing something so different. Set in Hopewell, a fictitious Midwestern town, Running with the Demon grew, in part, from Brooks' desire to write about his home town. "I wanted to write a fantasy that would say something about the nature of my childhood and what it was like growing
up in a small town, and about how magic exists for children," he explains.
Terry Brooks was born in Sterling, Illinois in 1944, and spent the first 40 years of his life there; Sterling is the prototype for Hopewell, the setting of Running with the Demon. Brooks received an undergraduate degree in English Literature from Hamilton College in New York State, and a law degree from Washington & Lee University in Virginia. He practiced law for many years, working during the day and writing at night. He wrote his first four books on that schedule, leaving law to write full time in 1986.
Brooks explains his decision to become a writer by saying that "writing is a profession that chooses you. It catapults you directly into a twilight zone of compulsive behavior, and you write because you have to write. One choice you have is your subject matter. I write fantasy because it gives me a bigger canvas to paint on."
Terry Brooks is the author of thirteen previous bestselling titles, written in two wildly popular series, Shannara and Magic Kingdom.
Brooks and his wife Judine live in Seattle, along with a cat. They have a second home in Hawaii, where Brooks is active with the prestigious Maui Writer's Conference.
Terry Brooks's website
This bio was last updated on 03/26/2014. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.
Question: Ever since the 1997 publication of Running with the Demon,
I've been fascinated by the implied connections between the present-day world of
the Word and Void series and the far-future world of the Shannara books. Now
you're making those connections explicit for the first time. How long have you
been planning to write this new series, how many books will comprise it, and how
long do you expect it to take you to complete?
Terry Brooks: This series could run as many as nine or ten books, and it
will take at least that many years to complete it. But I intend to break it
down into three different time periods with different sets of characters so that
a single storyline will conclude within three years of start up. That's my plan
just now, but it is subject to change without notice.
As for prior thought on this series, I haven't been thinking about it in
explicit terms for all that long. Only about two years.
Q: Can you talk about some of those connections without giving away any
spoilers? Did you always intend for the two series to be linked, or did you
only gradually come to that realization? How difficult has it been to mesh the
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