Suzanne Collins

Suzanne Collins is an American author best known for The Hunger Games trilogy, beginning with The Hunger Games in 2008, which follows Katniss Everdeen's forced participation in a televised fight-to-the-death staged by an authoritarian government, and which became one of the defining young adult franchises of the twenty-first century, credited with helping drive the dystopian-YA boom that followed it. Collins later expanded the world with the prequel novel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, centered on a young future President Snow, and the further prequel Sunrise on the Reaping.

Before Hunger Games, Collins wrote for children's television, including work on Nickelodeon shows, and the Underland Chronicles, a middle-grade fantasy series that established her interest in morally complex, war-themed storytelling for younger readers well before Katniss. She has said her father's military career and her own research into war and its effect on children directly shaped the trilogy's unusually unflinching treatment of violence and trauma for a YA audience.

A new reader should start with The Hunger Games itself. The trilogy was adapted into a hugely successful film franchise starring Jennifer Lawrence, with the prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes also adapted into a 2023 film.