Suzanne Collins Books in Order

If you want the core Hunger Games story: The Hunger Games → Catching Fire → Mockingjay
If you prefer Panem in timeline order: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes → Sunrise on the Reaping → The Hunger Games → Catching Fire → Mockingjay
For younger fantasy readers (~9–12): Gregor the Overlander → Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane → Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods → Gregor and the Marks of Secret → Gregor and the Code of Claw
For kids and families new to Collins: When Charlie McButton Lost Power → Year of the Jungle
If you enjoy TV style mysteries: Fire Proof

Suzanne Collins is a writer who moves between television scripts, picture books, and some of the most widely read young adult novels of the last few decades. She is best known for The Hunger Games and for the five book fantasy sequence The Underland Chronicles.

She was born on August 10, 1962, in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up as the youngest of four children in a military family. Her father served as an officer in the United States Air Force and as a military historian, so talk about past wars and his own deployments, including Vietnam, was part of everyday life.

Because of his career the family moved often, living in places along the eastern United States and in Europe before settling long enough for Collins to finish high school at the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham, where she studied theater. She earned a degree that combined theater and telecommunications at Indiana University and then completed a Master of Fine Arts in dramatic writing at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

Those programs led straight into television work. In the early 1990s Collins began writing for children's shows, first for a short lived sitcom and then for youth focused series on cable. She contributed scripts to shows such as Clarissa Explains It All, The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo, Little Bear, and Oswald, and later served as head writer on Clifford's Puppy Days. Years in writers' rooms taught her to build character quickly, structure episodes around strong beats, and think hard about what children can handle.

A colleague eventually nudged her toward writing books. Her first published work, the tie in novel Fire Proof linked to Shelby Woo, appeared in 1999. Not long after came Gregor the Overlander, the opening volume of The Underland Chronicles. Inspired in part by Alice in Wonderland, the series imagines a boy from New York who falls through a grate into a vast underground world where pale skinned humans ride bats into battle and giant creatures wage long grudges. Over five books Collins weaves prophecies, uneasy truces, and a growing war into stories that still pause for family moments and small jokes, while quietly asking readers to think about prejudice, strategy, and the human cost of conflict.

In 2008 she shifted to an even starker future with The Hunger Games, followed by Catching Fire and Mockingjay. The idea grew from flipping between reality television and news about modern wars, along with older influences like the myth of Theseus. Set in the dictatorship of Panem, the trilogy follows Katniss Everdeen, a girl whose survival in a televised death match accidentally turns her into the face of a rebellion. The books sold in the tens of millions, were translated around the world, and were adapted into a four film series that brought the characters to a still wider audience.

Alongside these novels Collins has written for younger readers. When Charlie McButton Lost Power is a rhyming picture book about a boy whose obsession with video games is interrupted by a blackout and by his very real little sister. Year of the Jungle: Memories from the Home Front draws on her own childhood to explore what it feels like when a parent goes to war and the child at home slowly realizes what that truly means. More recently she has returned to Panem with the prequel novels The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and Sunrise on the Reaping, which look backward in time to trace how the Hunger Games began and how earlier generations tried and failed to resist them.

Collins lives in Connecticut and tends to keep her private life out of the spotlight. In interviews she often comes back to the same concerns, from the stories children are told about war to the way entertainment and violence can blur together. Her books move quickly and are easy to enter, but they linger because she lets young characters carry the hard questions about power, loyalty, and responsibility.