Rick Riordan

Rick Riordan is an American author who reshaped middle-grade fantasy by fusing Greek mythology with contemporary American life in Percy Jackson and the Olympians, introducing Percy, a dyslexic, ADHD twelve-year-old who discovers he's the son of Poseidon and is thrust into a modern-day world where the Greek gods and monsters are alive and active. The series' five books became a publishing phenomenon and were later adapted into films and, more faithfully, a Disney+ television series with Riordan as an executive producer.

Riordan, a former middle-school teacher, built the original story to engage his own dyslexic son, and that origin shaped the franchise's lasting emphasis on neurodivergent kids as heroes rather than outsiders. He expanded the world into two direct sequel series — The Heroes of Olympus, which broadens the cast to include Roman demigods, and The Trials of Apollo, in which the god Apollo is cast down to earth in mortal form — plus spin-off series drawing on Egyptian and Norse mythology (The Kane Chronicles and Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard).

New readers should start with The Lightning Thief, the first Percy Jackson book, since the wider "Riordanverse" builds outward from it in careful sequence — Heroes of Olympus assumes it's been read, and Trials of Apollo assumes both prior series. Riordan remains highly active, both writing new entries and curating Rick Riordan Presents, an imprint publishing mythology-based fiction from underrepresented cultures by other authors.