Jim Butcher

Jim Butcher (born 26th October 1971 in Independence, Missouri) is an American author of urban and contemporary fantasy, best known as the writer of The Dresden Files. He is the youngest of three children and was, by his own account, introduced to genre fiction by his older sisters during a long bout of childhood illness (Tolkien and Brian Daley's Han Solo novels both feature in the version of the story he has told). He went on to write his way through a creative writing course taught by the novelist Deborah Chester at the University of Oklahoma. The book he produced for that course, an attempt to follow Chester's instructions to the letter as a kind of stubborn experiment, became the first manuscript of what would, several years later, be published as Storm Front (2000). The rest of his career has built outward from that point.

Butcher is now the author of three major fantasy series. The Dresden Files, the long-running urban fantasy that put him on the map, currently runs to eighteen novels and counting, with Twelve Months the most recent volume (January 2026) and Mirror Mirror confirmed as the nineteenth. Codex Alera is a six-volume secondary-world fantasy notable as much for the story of its inception as for the writing; Butcher famously took a bet on a writing forum that he could turn two terrible ideas into a workable series, the ideas in question being the Lost Roman Legion of the Ninth and Pokémon, and the result is one of the more underappreciated traditional fantasy sequences of the 2000s, following the young hero Tavi from the Calderon Valley in a world of elemental "furies". The Cinder Spires is his ongoing steampunk series, which began with The Aeronaut's Windlass in 2015 and continued with The Olympian Affair in 2023, along with the novella Warriorborn. Outside the main series he has also produced two Dresden Files short story collections (Side Jobs, 2010, and Brief Cases, 2018), several Dresden novellas (most recently The Law, set after Battle Ground), and Spider-Man: The Darkest Hours (2006), a one-off Marvel tie-in.

Butcher's books are characterised by a particular set of strengths. The plotting is generally tight, action-driven and self-aware. The voice, especially in The Dresden Files, is first-person, laconic, world-weary, and frequently very funny. The world-building accumulates patiently across volumes without ever quite overwhelming the immediate story. And the books are, regardless of their underlying register, almost uniformly easy reading; even when the stakes turn cosmic, you rarely feel as though you are working hard to get from page to page. He has been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel for Skin Game, and his books have appeared regularly on the New York Times bestseller list since the mid-2000s.

Away from the page, Butcher has spoken openly about his enthusiasms for martial arts, horse riding (he worked as a summer camp instructor in his younger years), tabletop and video gaming, and live action roleplay. He is also now the father of another fantasy writer; his son, James J. Butcher, has gone on to publish his own urban fantasy work in the Unorthodox Chronicles series.

For new readers, The Dresden Files remains the natural entry point; start with Storm Front and work forward. For those who would prefer a complete and finished series rather than an ongoing one, Codex Alera is six books, all published, and a perfectly reasonable place to begin instead.