Lev Grossman

Lev Grossman, born June 26, 1969, in Concord, Massachusetts, is an American novelist and journalist best known for bringing a sharp literary eye to modern fantasy. He came of age as a writer in a period when print criticism, consumer technology, video games, blogs, and web culture were all changing quickly, and his career moved through those worlds with unusual ease. From 2002 to 2016, he was the book critic and lead technology writer at Time magazine, a role that placed him close to both contemporary literature and the fast-growing digital culture of the early twenty-first century.

Grossman grew up in a strikingly literary and artistic family. His father was the poet Allen Grossman, his mother the novelist Judith Grossman, his twin brother Austin Grossman became a video game designer and novelist, and his sister Bathsheba Grossman became a sculptor. He has described his household as very unreligious, saying that he has “no religion at all” and that he approaches religion as an outsider in Western civilization. After graduating from Lexington High School, he studied literature at Harvard University and earned his degree in 1991. That background, literary, skeptical, and alert to genre, helps explain the mix of seriousness and play in his later work.

Before and during his years at Time, Grossman wrote widely for publications including The New York Times, Wired, Salon.com, Entertainment Weekly, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, and others. He covered consumer electronics, video games, blogs, viral videos, and web comics such as Penny Arcade and Achewood. In 2006 he traveled to Japan to report on the unveiling of the Wii console. He interviewed figures as varied as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Salman Rushdie, Neil Gaiman, Joan Didion, Jonathan Franzen, J. K. Rowling, and Johnny Cash, and wrote the Time Person of the Year 2010 feature article on Mark Zuckerberg. He also served on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle and chaired its Fiction Awards Panel.

Grossman’s fiction career began with Warp, published in 1997 after he moved to New York City. The novel followed “the lyrical misadventures of an aimless 20-something in Boston who has trouble distinguishing between reality and Star Trek.” His second novel, Codex, appeared in 2004 and became an international bestseller. He later wrote that he spent 17 years writing fiction before realizing he was a fantasy novelist, adding that although fantasy is sometimes dismissed as childish or escapist, he takes it “very, very seriously.” That conviction came fully into view with The Magicians, published in 2009, followed by The Magician King in 2011 and The Magician’s Land in 2014.

The Magicians trilogy, centered on Quentin Coldwater, Brakebills, and the magical land of Fillory, became Grossman’s best-known work. The Magicians won the 2010 Alex Award and the 2011 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and the trilogy was adapted by Sera Gamble and John McNamara into a Syfy television series that aired for five seasons from December 2015 to April 2020. Grossman later wrote the children’s books The Silver Arrow and The Golden Swift, the graphic novel The Magicians: Alice’s Story with Lilah Sturges and Pius Bak, the screenplay for The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, and The Bright Sword, a reimagining of the King Arthur legend published in 2024. His words still connect because they know the pull of fantasy without denying reality: “If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so.”