Christopher Paolini
Christopher Paolini was born on November 17, 1983, in Southern California, and grew up in Paradise Valley, Montana, in a family that deeply valued education, creativity, and the life of the imagination. Homeschooled from an early age, Paolini graduated from high school at fifteen and immediately began writing the novel that would make him famous. Inspired by his love of fantasy literature — particularly J.R.R. Tolkien, Anne McCaffrey, and Raymond Feist — and by the vast Montana wilderness that surrounded him, he completed the first draft of Eragon at the age of fifteen. After his parents’ small publishing company released the book, Paolini and his family spent a year promoting it at schools, libraries, and bookstores, with the teenage author appearing in medieval costume to read from and discuss his work.
The book came to the attention of novelist Carl Hiaasen, whose stepson was reading it, and Hiaasen brought it to the attention of his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. When Knopf published Eragon in 2003, it became an immediate bestseller, and the story of a fifteen-year-old who had written a publishable epic fantasy novel became as compelling as the novel itself. The book follows a young farm boy named Eragon who discovers a dragon egg and is drawn into an ancient conflict between the tyrannical Empire and the last of the Dragon Riders. Set in the world of Alagaësia, the novel draws richly on the traditions of epic fantasy while demonstrating the remarkable narrative instincts of its teenage author.
Paolini expanded the story across three further novels — Eldest (2005), Brisingr (2008), and Inheritance (2011) — completing the Inheritance Cycle and demonstrating his growth as a writer across a decade of work begun in childhood. The series has sold over 40 million copies worldwide and was adapted into a major film in 2006. Paolini returned to Alagaësia with The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm (2018) and Murtagh (2023), and also published the science fiction novel To Sleep in a Sea of Stars (2020), marking his expansion into a new genre.
Paolini’s story is one of the most inspiring in contemporary publishing — a teenager who loved books so much he wrote one, and whose dedication and family support made that book a global phenomenon. His writing has grown considerably from the precocious but derivative fantasy of Eragon to the more confident, original voice of his adult fiction, charting the development of a writer who has been at his craft, publicly, for his entire adult life. Christopher Paolini lives in Montana and continues to write, his career a testament to what youthful passion and hard work can achieve.
