About Brian

Brian Hutka writes fantasy the way he lives: at home, in California, surrounded by his family.

The Wiken books — seven of them, a complete series — grew out of the four years since his daughter Olivia was born. What began as stories for his own children became a world: Mulberry Academy, a living school folded into the hills, where students keep blood-shared log books, where the building itself decides which corridor you need, and where something in a grey cloak has been watching from the edges for a very long time. At the center of it is Ollie, an eleven-year-old orphan who doesn't believe in magic — including, at first, her own.

Wiken is written for the reader Brian remembers being, and for the two readers he's raising. His son Bryce lends his name to Ollie's best friend. The family animals are in the books too, in the way families keep the ones they've lost: watch the dedication pages — a golden Labrador, a small white cat, an angel cat with a grey ear-patch, a brindled cat who was nobody's friend and impossible not to love. The books are funny in the way school is funny and serious in the way growing up is serious, and they are not afraid of the dark, because the dark is where the story is.

The world kept growing. Wiken: Revival returns to Mulberry six centuries later, when the magic is going grey and a new generation has to learn what keeping means. The Graduate Register tells the adult story unfolding one fold over from the children's school — the same corridors, older eyes. And Utopia, a separate series in four books, follows the sleepers of a drowned valley and the people who wake them, one room at a time.

Brian lives with his wife Jenn — the first reader of everything, and the person Book 7 is dedicated to — and their children. The Purple Flame, the first Wiken book, is where it starts.