Robin Sloan

Robin Sloan is an American author. His debut novel, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, was published in 2012.

Early life Sloan was born to a home economics teacher and an appliance salesman. He grew up in Troy, Michigan, where he attended Wattles Elementary School. He graduated from Athens High School in 1998.

Sloan attended Michigan State University, where he co-founded the literary magazine Oats. He was also a columnist and cartoonist for The State News student newspaper. He graduated in 2002 with a degree in economics from the Eli Broad College of Business.

Sloan moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004 to work at Current TV as a media strategist/interactive producer.

Career Sloan crowdfunded his novella Annabel Scheme in 2009 through Kickstarter. After successfully funding the project, he quit his job at Current to write the novella full time.

Prior to working as an author, Sloan worked at Twitter as a media manager, helping news companies condense their reports to Twitter's 140 characters tweet limit. It is about a laid-off Silicon Valley tech worker who begins working at a dusty bookstore with very few customers, only to start discovering one secret after another. The mysterious old books, along with the store's owner, lead to a 500‑year‑old secret society.

His second novel Sourdough was released in September 2017.

His speculative fiction short story The Conspiracy Museum was published in The Atlantic in May 2020 as part of the "Shadowlands" project exploring conspiracy thinking in the United States.

His third novel, Moonbound, was released on 11 June 2024.