John Flanagan

Flanagan wrote the first Ranger's Apprentice stories as short pieces to get his son reading, about a boy too small for the cavalry who is apprenticed instead to a laconic ranger with a longbow. They were published in Australia in 2004 and have since sold in the tens of millions across a dozen books plus the Brotherband spin-off. He had worked in advertising and written television comedy, which shows in the timing of the dialogue. He kept writing them into his seventies.