N.K. Jemisin

4 universes Last reviewed 2026-08-15

N.K. Jemisin was born on September 19, 1972, in Iowa City, Iowa, and grew up in New York City and Mobile, Alabama. She earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from Tulane University and a master's degree in education, in counseling, from the University of Maryland, College Park, and worked as a mental health and career counselor before turning to writing full time in 2016, following a successful Patreon crowdfunding campaign. Her debut novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (2010), launched the Inheritance Trilogy, but she is best known for the Broken Earth trilogy, comprising The Fifth Season (2015), The Obelisk Gate (2016), and The Stone Sky (2017), as well as the novel The City We Became (2020) and the comic series Far Sector (2019). With The Fifth Season she became the first African-American author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and she went on to win the Hugo for each subsequent volume of the trilogy, the first author to win the award for every book in a series. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2020, was named to the Time 100 list in 2021, and received the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Award in 2025.

Universe(s)

Books

• The Narcomancer (2007) · The Dreamblood Duology Expanded Canon
• The Broken Kingdoms (2010) · The Inheritance Trilogy Core Canon
• The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (2010) · The Inheritance Trilogy Core Canon
• The Kingdom of Gods (2011) · The Inheritance Trilogy Core Canon
• The Killing Moon (2012) · The Dreamblood Duology Core Canon
• The Shadowed Sun (2012) · The Dreamblood Duology Core Canon
• Stone Hunger (2014) · The Broken Earth Expanded Canon
• The Awakened Kingdom (2014) · The Inheritance Trilogy Expanded Canon
• Shades in Shadow: An Inheritance Triptych (2015) · The Inheritance Trilogy Expanded Canon
• The Fifth Season (2015) · The Broken Earth Core Canon
• The Obelisk Gate (2016) · The Broken Earth Core Canon
• The Stone Sky (2017) · The Broken Earth Core Canon
• The City We Became (2020) · The Great Cities Duology Core Canon
• The World We Make (2022) · The Great Cities Duology Core Canon

Aggregate across all universes

These are separate, unrelated universes; the totals below are plain sums of already-published per-universe facts, never a blended or averaged score across them. See each universe's own figures above.

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 10 books
• Award recognitions across all universes: 25 (8 won, 4 finalist mention, 12 nomination, 1 honor mention)

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