Patrick Rothfuss

Patrick Rothfuss

Patrick James Rothfuss, born June 6, 1973, is an American author best known for The Kingkiller Chronicle, a fantasy series that began with his debut novel, The Name of the Wind, in 2007. His work belongs to the wave of early twenty-first-century fantasy that found a wide readership in both traditional publishing and fan communities. The first book won several awards, including a Quill Award, and was named among Publishers Weekly’s Books of the Year. Its sequel, The Wise Man’s Fear, appeared in 2011 and reached No. 1 on The New York Times Hardback Fiction Best Seller list.

Rothfuss was born in Madison, Wisconsin, graduated from DeForest Area High School, and earned a BA in English from the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point in 1999. While there, he contributed to The Pointer, the campus paper, and produced a widely circulated parody warning about the Goodtimes Virus. He later taught part-time at Stevens Point and received a master’s degree in arts and English from Washington State University in 2002. That same year, he won the Writers of the Future Second Quarter competition with “The Road to Levenshir,” an excerpt from the then-unpublished The Wise Man’s Fear.

The world of The Kingkiller Chronicle expanded beyond the two main novels. Rothfuss published The Slow Regard of Silent Things in 2014, a companion novella centered on Auri and illustrated by Nate Taylor. He also released “How Old Holly Came To Be” in the anthology Unfettered in 2013, and The Lightning Tree, a Bast story, in Rogues in 2014. That story was later expanded into the standalone novella The Narrow Road Between Desires, again illustrated by Taylor. Rothfuss and Taylor also collaborated on The Princess and Mr. Whiffle books, described as “a dark twist on the classic children’s picture-book.”

His interests have reached into comics, games, podcasts, publishing, and charity. In 2018, he co-wrote Rick and Morty vs. Dungeons & Dragons with Jim Zub, with art by Troy Little; its deluxe edition was nominated for a 2022 Eisner Award. He collaborated with James Ernest on Tak, an abstract strategy game based on one from The Wise Man’s Fear, and was part of the story design team for Torment: Tides of Numenera. In 2008 he founded Worldbuilders, a charity that has raised more than $11.5 million, primarily for Heifer International. In 2021, he partnered with Grim Oak Press to create Underthing Press, whose first project was a reprint of Ursula Vernon’s Hugo Award-winning webcomic Digger.

Rothfuss’s public career has also included long reader attention on The Doors of Stone, the announced concluding volume of the trilogy, which has not been published. In 2020, editor and publisher Betsy Wollheim publicly said she had not seen a word of book three; the post was later deleted. In 2021, Rothfuss said he would share a full chapter if a charity goal was met, later adding stretch goals for a recorded version, but as of May 2026 the chapter had not been released. Even with that unfinished question, his published work continues to draw readers through its careful world-building, companion stories, and the sense that stories, songs, and names carry real weight.