Colin Meloy

1 universe Last reviewed 2026-09-04

Colin Meloy is an American musician and author best known as the singer, guitarist, and primary songwriter of the indie folk-rock band The Decemberists, which he formed in Portland, Oregon in 2000 and which has since earned Grammy recognition. Alongside his music career, Meloy co-created the middle-grade fantasy series the Wildwood Chronicles with his wife, illustrator Carson Ellis. The pair originally conceived the project's premise—a hidden magical world existing alongside contemporary Portland—while living together in a Portland warehouse before The Decemberists existed, enjoying trading story ideas and creative riffs off one another. Meloy wrote roughly eighty pages of the manuscript before setting it aside for several years to focus on music, later returning to substantially revise it; the protagonist changed from a character named Ruthie to Prue McKeel, and the plot shifted from a quest to rescue a lost father to one to save a kidnapped baby brother. The finished trilogy comprises Wildwood (2011), Under Wildwood (2012), and Wildwood Imperium (2014), each illustrated by Ellis, blending whimsical talking-animal fantasy with darker political intrigue in the invented realm of the Impassable Wilderness. Meloy has cited J. R. R. Tolkien and Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain as formative influences, along with Piers Anthony's Xanth novels, which he credits as a direct inspiration for the series' concept of a fantastical world existing within, and overlapping with, the real one.

Universe(s)

Books

• Wildwood (2011) · The Wildwood Chronicles Core Canon
• Under Wildwood (2012) · The Wildwood Chronicles Core Canon
• Wildwood Imperium (2014) · The Wildwood Chronicles Core Canon

Aggregate across all universes

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 3 books
• Award recognitions across all universes: 0 (None recorded)

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