Piers Anthony

Piers Anthony is a prolific British-born American author best known for Xanth, his long-running comic fantasy series built around magical puns and wordplay, which has run to more than forty novels since 1977. Before Xanth made him a bestseller, Anthony worked through a wide range of genres and collaborations, including the pulpy 1970s martial-arts adventure series Jason Striker (co-written with Roberto Fuentes) and hard science-fiction work such as the Cluster and Bio of a Space Tyrant series, showing an early willingness to write across genre boundaries and in partnership with other writers. Anthony's fiction is distinguished by its playfulness with language, its willingness to blend genres within a single series, and a famously prolific output sustained across more than five decades. He has been outspoken about author rights and self-publishing well ahead of most of his peers, maintaining a detailed, opinionated website that reviews small presses and publishing contracts for other writers. Alongside Xanth, his other major works include the Incarnations of Immortality series, which personifies concepts like Death, Time, and War as literal offices held by human characters, and the Apprentice Adept series, which alternates between a magic world and a science-fiction one. Anthony continues to write and remains one of fantasy's most commercially durable authors, with Xanth alone selling in the tens of millions of copies.