Leigh Eddings

Leigh Eddings was an American author who worked in close, lifelong creative partnership with her husband David Eddings on his epic fantasy novels, though her contribution went largely uncredited in their earliest, best-known work. She is believed to have contributed substantially to the plotting and prose of the original Belgariad and Malloreon series in the 1980s without formal cover credit, a common arrangement for co-writing spouses at the time; the couple began crediting her openly starting with the Elenium trilogy in 1989, after which every subsequent David Eddings novel carried both their names. Together the Eddingses went on to co-write the Tamuli trilogy, the standalone volumes Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress (which expand on the backstories of two of the Belgariad's central characters), and their final joint work, the four-volume Dreamers series, completed in 2006. Beyond fiction, the couple also published The Rivan Codex, a nonfiction companion collecting their worldbuilding notes and early drafts for the Belgariad and Malloreon, giving readers an unusually direct look at how the two of them built one of fantasy's best-selling story worlds together. Leigh Eddings died in 2007, two years before her husband, after a writing partnership that spanned more than three decades.