Tui T. Sutherland

More than sixty books, several pen names, sixty-seven million copies sold: Tui T. Sutherland's numbers are the kind that usually belong to a franchise rather than to a writer. Her mother, who is from New Zealand, named her after the tui, a bird native there. She grew up moving between Venezuela, Paraguay, the Dominican Republic and Florida before high school in New Jersey, did theatre backstage rather than on it, and came out of Williams College having decided fiction was the steadier living. In 2009 she won 46,200 dollars over three games on Jeopardy!, which is a fair indicator of the sort of brain that keeps a continent's worth of dragon politics straight.

Wings of Fire is the reason for the sales. It is a war story told by dragons, in which each book hands the narration to a different young dragon from a different tribe, so the reader keeps meeting the same events from the other side. That rotation is the trick: the villains of one book are the frightened kids of the next, and the tribes have politics rather than personalities. She writes in five-book arcs and the arcs connect, which is why children who start the series tend to keep going for years.

Alongside it she has written a mythical-creature adventure in The Menagerie and work-for-hire nonfiction for younger readers, but the dragons are the career.