Terry Goodkind

Terry Goodkind was an American author best known for the Sword of Truth series, launched with Wizard's First Rule in 1994, which grew into an eleven-book epic fantasy saga following Richard Cypher, a woods guide who discovers he is the last of a line of powerful wizards, and Kahlan Amnell, a Confessor whose touch strips away a person's free will. The series became a massive commercial success, selling in the tens of millions of copies worldwide, and was loosely adapted into the television series Legend of the Seeker. Goodkind was known for combining traditional quest-fantasy structure with often brutal violence and an outspoken philosophical undercurrent influenced by Objectivism and the writing of Ayn Rand, giving the Sword of Truth books a distinctly individualist, good-versus-evil moral framework that set them apart from much of the genre's other epic fantasy. He continued the world of Sword of Truth after its main sequence concluded, writing the Richard and Kahlan series as a direct continuation and the Nicci Chronicles following one of the original series' most prominent supporting characters. A former violinist and painter before turning to writing full-time, Goodkind was known for being unusually resistant to being categorized purely as a fantasy author, insisting his books were 'stories about human beings' first. He died in 2020.