Brandon Sanderson

Most fantasy writers build a world and then decide what magic it has. Sanderson builds the magic first, as a system with rules, costs and edge cases, and lets the world follow from it. That inversion is the engine of nearly everything he has written, and it is why his books read less like myth than like a very well-run puzzle: if a power can do something in chapter three, it can still do exactly that in chapter forty, and the climax is usually the reader watching a character finally use it correctly.

He writes high fantasy, science fiction and young adult, and the two things he is best known for, the Mistborn books and The Stormlight Archive, share a single connected universe called the Cosmere. Mistborn, The Well of Ascension and The Hero of Ages form the original trilogy; The Way of Kings, Words of Radiance and Oathbringer are the enormous ones. Elantris is the earliest book listed here and the machinery is visible in it, which makes it more interesting rather than less.

Outside the Cosmere he runs several other series: The Reckoners (Steelheart, Firefight, Calamity), Skyward (Starsight, Cytonic) and the deliberately silly Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians. He also finished Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, which is the hardest job in the genre and which took three books: The Gathering Storm, Towers of Midnight and A Memory of Light. There are two graphic novels as well, White Sand and Dark One.

He has a Hugo for a novella and another for related work. The standard criticism, that the prose is functional rather than beautiful, is fair; sentences exist to move information. What you get in exchange is structure, and very few writers deliver a climax that pays off setups laid down hundreds of pages earlier without ever cheating.