Rebecca Yarros

Rebecca Yarros was born on April 13, 1981, in Washington, D.C. She studied European history and English at Troy University in Alabama. She started writing seriously during a hard stretch, while her husband was deployed to Afghanistan.

Her debut came in 2014 with Full Measures, from Entangled Publishing, the house that would stay with her for almost a decade. A steady run of contemporary romances followed, some self-published and two co-written with Jay Crownover. The Last Letter (2019) made Kirkus Reviews' best books of the year list, and In the Likely Event (2023) came out from Montlake. It was a solid career inside romance, still short of the reach that came next.

The turn came in 2023 with Fourth Wing, the first book of The Empyrean, published by Red Tower Books, Entangled's fantasy imprint. The premise: Violet Sorrengail, physically fragile and raised to be a scribe, is forced by her mother, a general, into Basgiath War College, where cadets compete for the chance to bond with dragons. Those who fail rarely live. The mix of military school, dragons with big personalities and a rivals-to-lovers romance hit romantasy readers right away.

The numbers stunned the industry. By August 2024 Fourth Wing had spent 65 weeks on the New York Times best seller list, including time at number one, and it ranked third on Publishers Weekly's list of 2023's top sellers. Iron Flame arrived that November and set a record for the most preorders in a single day at the British chain Waterstones. Onyx Storm, released in January 2025, sold more than 2.7 million copies in its first week, according to the New York Times.

Awards followed. Fourth Wing won the 2023 Goodreads Choice Award for romantasy, an Alex Award, BookTok Book of the Year at the TikTok Book Awards, and honors at the British Book Awards and the Australian Book Industry Awards. Iron Flame took the 2024 Dragon Award for fantasy, and Onyx Storm won the Goodreads prize again in 2025. Yarros has said the series will run five books. In September 2026 Threshing Day, a story collection set in the same world, came out in the United States.

Violet's physical fragility is central to the premise, and the author speaks openly about having Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, as do her sons. The books move between training, wartime politics and a slow-burn romance, always in the heroine's voice.

On screen, Michael B. Jordan's production company Outlier Society and Amazon MGM Studios picked up the rights in October 2023, with Yarros as an executive producer. Prime Video greenlit the series in May 2026, with no premiere date yet. Away from books, she and her husband founded the nonprofit OneOctober in 2019 to help children in foster care; the couple adopted a daughter they had fostered. Yarros is also an outspoken Colorado Avalanche fan, and the hockey team held a Fourth Wing night in 2025.