Taran Matharu Books in Order

For the main Summoner arc: The Novice → The Inquisition → The Battlemage.
For Summoner prequels and lore: Origins → The Outcast → A Fine Welcome → The Summoner's Handbook.
For sci-fi survival games: The Chosen → The Challenger → The Champion.
For adult dragon fantasy: Dragon Rider → The Tainted Khan.

Taran Matharu was born in London in 1990 and grew up there in a family with Brazilian and Indian roots. He found books early, and they mattered. As a child he has written openly about being bullied and feeling like an outsider, and fantasy gave him a place to breathe.

He started writing young too. His first book, begun when he was nine, had a hero with a wizard uncle and an evil witch to fight. It sounds like the kind of story a bookish kid would invent, but the habit stuck.

Before he became a full-time novelist, Matharu studied Business Administration at the University of Bath and graduated with first-class honors. He then worked in digital sales at Penguin Random House, a short internship that changed the way he looked at publishing. Authors stopped seeming like distant, impossible figures. They were people with drafts, deadlines, and a route into print.

That was the nudge.

After the internship, while taking time off to travel, he joined NaNoWriMo in 2013 and began the story that became The Novice. He posted chapters on Wattpad as he wrote. Readers found it quickly, and the numbers grew fast, reaching millions of reads in a few months. Agents and publishers followed, and the Summoner trilogy became his first published series.

The books that made his name, The Novice, The Inquisition, and The Battlemage, follow Fletcher, a blacksmith's apprentice who can summon demons. Readers tend to come for the creature bonds and battle training, then stay for the friendships, school rivalries, class tension, and the wider war around the Hominum Empire. Matharu later returned to that world with The Outcast, the shorter Origins, A Fine Welcome, and The Summoner's Handbook.

He did not stay in one lane.

The Contender trilogy, starting with The Chosen, sends Cade Carter into a deadly game full of prehistoric creatures, ancient relics, alien rulers, and survival stakes that keep widening. Then Matharu moved into adult fantasy with Dragon Rider and The Tainted Khan, the opening books of The Soulbound Saga, where Jai, a royal hostage, bonds with a dragon named Winter and tries to fight his way back to his people.

Across those books, Matharu returns to outsiders under pressure. His heroes are often young, underestimated, and forced into systems built by people with more money, rank, or power. The settings change from demon academies to alien arenas to dragon courts, but the questions stay close to the ground: Who do you trust? What do you owe your friends? How do you use power without becoming like the people who abused it?

Matharu lives in London, the city where he was born and raised. He has also kept one foot in the practical side of books, including publishing work beyond his own fiction. For readers, though, the through-line is simple: he writes big adventure stories that are easy to enter and built around characters trying to survive unfair worlds.