Sarah J. Maas

Sarah Janet Maas was born on March 5, 1986, in New York City and grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side. She read fantasy from an early age and names Garth Nix's Sabriel and Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown among her first loves. Other influences come from outside books: movie scores, classical music, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sailor Moon.

At 16 she started a story about an assassin, a sort of Cinderella in reverse: instead of a servant, the heroine is the most feared killer in the kingdom. She posted the chapters on FictionPress as Queen of Glass, and it became one of the site's most read stories. Once she decided to look for a publisher, she took it all down. In 2008 she graduated magna cum laude from Hamilton College with a creative writing degree, and that same year she began querying agents.

She signed with agent Tamar Rydzinski in 2009, and Bloomsbury bought the book in March 2010. Throne of Glass came out in 2012 and launched an eight-volume series, counting the novella collection The Assassin's Blade, which wrapped up with Kingdom of Ash in October 2018. Along the way, in 2015, came A Court of Thorns and Roses, a book she had written back in 2009. The premise moves Beauty and the Beast to Prythian, the land of the faeries: Feyre, a human huntress, kills a wolf and has to pay the debt by living on the other side of the wall.

That series changed the scale of her career. Next came A Court of Mist and Fury (2016), A Court of Wings and Ruin (2017), the novella A Court of Frost and Starlight (2018) and the spin-off A Court of Silver Flames (2021). Readers who had followed her since Throne of Glass grew up with her, and the books grew more adult, with more romance and explicit scenes. Vox went as far as calling her the queen of romantasy, the label the industry gave to the blend of epic fantasy and romance.

In 2020 she launched a third series, Crescent City, her first written straight for adults. House of Earth and Blood swaps castles for a city with cell phones, cars and angels, and follows Bryce Quinlan as she hunts for whoever killed her best friend. House of Sky and Breath (2022) and House of Flame and Shadow (2024) followed. In 2018 she also wrote a Catwoman novel for the DC Icons line.

Her trademarks are easy to spot: morally gray characters, detailed courts and maps, couples that come together slowly and the biggest turns saved for the last third of the book. Critics praise her worldbuilding and have pushed for more racial and LGBTQ+ diversity in her casts. In 2024, the Utah State Board of Education pulled six of her books from the state's public schools under a new law.

On screen, Hulu picked up A Court of Thorns and Roses in 2021, but the series never got made. In bookstores, the count topped 75 million copies sold by 2024, with translations into about 40 languages and a long run of Goodreads Choice Awards. Maas lives in New York, is married to Josh Wasserman, whom she met in college, and keeps writing the Court books: A Court of Splintered Harmony is set for October 27, 2026.