Robin Hobb is the pen name of American author Margaret Astrid Lindholm Ogden, who also publishes fantasy fiction under the name Megan Lindholm. Born in California in 1952 and raised in Alaska and Washington State, she began publishing as Megan Lindholm in the 1980s before adopting the Robin Hobb name for the Farseer Trilogy in 1995.
The two names represent genuinely distinct bodies of work rather than a simple rebranding - the Lindholm novels are smaller in scale and more intimate, while the Hobb novels are characterised by their emotional intensity, long-form character development, and willingness to subject protagonists to sustained suffering.
The Realm of the Elderlings sequence, published across three decades, is widely regarded as one of the finest achievements in contemporary epic fantasy for the depth of its characterisation and the uncompromising honesty of its emotional register.
