Terry Brooks was born in Illinois in 1944. A writer since high school and heavily influenced by William Faulkner, it took him seven years to finish writing The Sword of Shannara, which published in 1977. Since then, he has written numerous novels in the Shannara, Landover, and Word/Void series, and was hand-selected by George Lucas to write the novelization of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. A TV series based on the Shannara books—The Shannara Chronicles—premiered on MTV in 2016.
