Soman Chainani

Soman Chainani is an American author who studied at Harvard and earned an MFA in film directing at Columbia before turning to children's fiction. He made his debut in 2013 with The School for Good and Evil, which follows best friends Sophie and Agatha after they're spirited away to a fairy-tale training academy that sorts students into princesses-in-training and future villains — a premise that immediately complicates the usual assumptions about which girl belongs where. The book launched a six-novel main series, later expanded with a prequel duology, that has sold more than 2.5 million copies in 30 languages, with every entry reaching the New York Times bestseller list. Netflix adapted the first novel into a 2022 feature film directed by Paul Feig, with Chainani serving as an executive producer, giving the series a much wider audience beyond its existing readership. New readers should start with The School for Good and Evil itself; the main series is best read in publication order, since Sophie and Agatha's story builds continuously across all six books before the prequels fill in earlier history. Chainani's filmmaking background shows in the series' visual, cinematic set pieces and its willingness to subvert fairy-tale convention rather than simply retell it.