Brandon Sanderson is known for his books set in the Cosmere universe. He writes primarily in the genres of epic fantasy and science fiction, and his best-known series are Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive.

Sanderson wrote novels throughout his post-secondary studies in creative writing at Brigham Young University and had completed twelve manuscripts before Tor Books, known for publishing trend-setting science fiction and fantasy, published Elantris in 2005, which was the sixth of his completed manuscripts. The next year he published The Final Empire, the first of the Mistborn novels.

Sanderson is also the author of the final books of Robert Jordan's epic fantasy series, The Wheel of Time, which he wrote after Jordan's passing at the behest of his editor and wife Harriet McDougal. Sanderson has said that McDougal reached out after reading The Final Empire. From 2009 – 2013 Sanderson published the last three Wheel of Time Books: The Gathering Storm, Towers of Midnight, and A Memory of Light.

Sanderson's influence over the epic fantasy genre extends beyond his novels to his conceptualization and popularization of "magic systems," which are the sets of rules governing what is and isn't possible (and at what cost) in a fictional setting with the aim of sustaining reader interest, narrative tension, and a sense of wonder. He conceives of a spectrum ranging from "hard magic" to "soft magic," where the former is rigidly structured and understood in explicit terms akin to a field of engineering, and the latter is less sharply defined and has more in common with mysticism.Read moreRead less