Tui T. Sutherland

Tui Tamara Sutherland was born on July 31, 1978, in Caracas, Venezuela. Her first name comes from the tūī, a bird native to New Zealand, where her mother is from. She moved around a lot as a kid: the family lived in Asunción, Paraguay, in Miami and in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, before settling in New Jersey, where she went to high school.

She studied English literature at Williams College, graduating in 1998, and later earned a master's degree in art history. Her career in books started on the other side of the desk. Sutherland worked as a children's book editor in New York, first at Grosset & Dunlap and then at HarperCollins. Knowing the business from the inside helped once she switched to writing.

Her solo debut was This Must Be Love in 2004, a young adult retelling of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Over the next years she wrote a lot, under several names. She joined the team of writers behind the Erin Hunter pen name, which produces the Warriors series about cats and Seekers about bears. She also spent time in the Pirates of the Caribbean world: as Rob Kidd she wrote the Legends of the Brethren Court series, and as T. T. Sutherland she wrote the junior novelization of At World's End (2007), which made the New York Times bestseller list. She also wrote as Heather Williams and Tamara Summers, and under her own name published the Avatars trilogy (2006 to 2008) and the Pet Trouble series (2009 and 2010). A bit of trivia: in 2009 she was a two-day Jeopardy! champion.

In July 2012 came The Dragonet Prophecy, the first Wings of Fire book. Five dragonets from different tribes have been raised in hiding to fulfill a prophecy that promises to end a war. Each book is narrated by a different dragon, and that rotating point of view became the series' signature. The first arc ends with The Brightest Night (2014). The second, starting with Moon Rising (2016), is set at a school for dragons of every tribe. The third, opening with The Lost Continent (2019), takes the story to another continent. In March 2026, The Hybrid Prince kicked off a fourth arc.

The world kept growing sideways too. Darkstalker (2016) goes back thousands of years, Dragonslayer (2020) shows the war from the humans' side, and the Winglets stories fill in the gaps. Since 2018 the books have been adapted into graphic novels illustrated by Mike Holmes. Along the way she co-wrote The Menagerie trilogy (2013 to 2015) with her sister, Kari Sutherland, and wrote one volume of the multi-author Spirit Animals series.

Sutherland's tone is light on the surface and serious underneath. Her dragons bicker, crack jokes and make mistakes, but the books deal with war, prejudice between tribes, guilt and friendship, and there is rarely a simple villain. That's a big reason readers who started as kids stick around years later. All told, she has written more than 60 books.

On screen, Wings of Fire hasn't premiered yet. A Netflix animated project was canceled in 2022, and in May 2025 an animated series was announced for Prime Video, with Sutherland as executive producer and co-writer. She lives in Watertown, Massachusetts, with her husband and their two sons.