Garth Nix

Garth Nix is an Australian fantasy author whose Sabriel and the Old Kingdom series created one of the most original magic systems in modern fantasy — necromancy as the control of death through bells — and remains essential reading in YA fantasy.

Garth Nix worked in publishing, public relations, and literary agency before becoming a full-time writer, and his industry knowledge shows in the craft of his fiction. Sabriel (1995), his breakthrough novel, introduced the Old Kingdom: a secondary world in which the boundary between life and death is maintained by a family of necromancers called Abhorsens, who use magical bells to bind the Dead and return them to Death. The magic system is among the most original and internally consistent in modern fantasy, and it is inseparable from the novel’s larger meditation on mortality and duty.

The Old Kingdom series — Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen — follows different protagonists across the same world, each facing different aspects of the threat that the Dead pose to the living. Sabriel is the most self-contained and arguably the finest; Lirael introduces a more complex protagonist whose identity is shaped by an absence rather than an inheritance. Goldenhand (2016) and Clariel (2014) extend the world further. Nix’s prose is clear and confident, his world-building is disciplined, and his female protagonists are resourceful and dimensional in ways that were not universal in YA fantasy at the time of publication.

His Keys to the Kingdom series, beginning with Mister Monday (2003), is a more whimsical secondary-world fantasy aimed at slightly younger readers. Nix has also published science fiction and shorter fiction. He is widely respected in the fantasy community for his meticulous world-building and the consistency of quality across a long career.