brandon sanderson said at MCM Comic Con London 2026 that Dalinar Kholin is the character he is proudest of creating. He pointed to writing he started at 16, long before he had published a single word professionally, and said the figure he now sees as central to The Stormlight Archive began in that early notebook work.
MCM Comic Con London 2026
“I'm probably going to settle on Dalinar,” Sanderson told the audience, making the choice plain in front of a live panel. He added: “I have writing from when I was 16 and trying my first novel that has both Hoid and Dalinar in it. I often look at Dalinar as my first character. He's definitely the first character I can remember.”
Dalinar’s path is not just long; it is unusually early. The article places the character’s origins in the late 1980s, which means Sanderson was building one of his most important Cosmere figures years before the books that made him a major force in fantasy reached readers.
Dalinar Across Five Novels
Dalinar Kholin appears in The Stormlight Archive, where he was once known as the Blackthorn and later became a Bondsmith. Across five novels, his arc runs from conqueror to something approaching a conscience for an entire world. That kind of transformation is the reason Sanderson’s answer carries weight: he did not pick the loudest character or the most recent one, but the one that has held the longest line through his work.
The practical takeaway for readers is simple: Dalinar sits at the center of Sanderson’s own creative history, not just the series he inhabits. For anyone following The Stormlight Archive, that makes the character’s role less like a favorite and more like a foundation stone, one Sanderson says he can trace back to teenage pages.
Hoid and the first notebook
The most revealing part of Sanderson’s answer is that Dalinar and Hoid appear together in that first novel attempt. That puts two of the Cosmere’s defining names in the same early draft, before publication, before the franchise scale, and before the books that would make both characters familiar to readers.
Sanderson’s choice suggests a creator looking back at the character who best captures the distance between teenage ambition and a finished literary universe. Dalinar is the one he settled on, and the reason is written into the timeline: a character born in a teen notebook, carried forward for five novels, and still the one he names first when asked which creation he values most.
