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Brandon Sanderson kicked off Dragonsteel Nexus 2025 in Salt Lake City with a surprise: the Cosmere is officially going on tour.
At Thursday’s welcome ceremony at the Salt Palace Convention Center, Sanderson and his wife, Emily, told fans that Dragonsteel is headed to London in 2026. The Utah-based author will appear at the London MCM Comic Con in May and deliver a fantasy literature lecture at Pembroke College, the Oxford college J.R.R. Tolkien once called home, according to Deseret News.
The company will also export one of Nexus’ signature events, the Worldhopper Ball, bringing its cosplay-heavy, in-universe party to U.K. readers for the first time. Fans can RSVP online so Dragonsteel knows what to ship across the Atlantic.
From Salt Lake City to a global Cosmere
Even before the London news, Nexus had already grown into one of fantasy’s biggest single-author gatherings. A recent state-of-the-company update on Sanderson’s blog detailed how Dragonsteel scaled to a sold-out, 10,000-attendee convention in 2023, mirroring the explosive growth of his books and gaming projects.
This year’s crowd shows just how wide that reach now is. During the welcome, Sanderson asked who was local and who had traveled. Most hands belonged to fans from outside Utah, with some attendees flying in from outside the U.S., Deseret reports.
For readers who’ve been tracking his rise—from early Cosmere novels through the mega-success of being dubbed fantasy’s ‘new Tolkien’—Nexus functions as a live, annual “State of Sanderson.” Panels, signings, and booths give fans a front-row seat to the next phase of the ever-expanding Cosmere.
What’s next in the Cosmere timeline
Nexus 2025 also lands in the middle of one of Sanderson’s busiest creative stretches. He recently wrapped Wind and Truth, the 2024 novel that closes the first half of The Stormlight Archive, and he’s now zeroed in on Mistborn Era Three—nicknamed “Ghostbloods”—with plans to draft the whole trilogy before any volume is published, as he’s reiterated in fan Q&As on Reddit.
On deck is a major new Cosmere novel, Isles of the Emberdark, whose English collector’s edition arrives July 1, 2025 and pushes the universe further along its internal timeline than any previous book, per early coverage on Meristation. Other projects in the pipeline include a White Sand novel, long-awaited Elantris sequels, and the Horneater novella.
Sanderson is also looking beyond the Cosmere. A new collaboration with Peter Orullian, The Strata Wars, will launch a fresh fantasy trilogy in 2026, People reports. All of this is unfolding as fantasy and romantasy fandoms drive big event-based promotions across publishing and audio, a trend highlighted by Axios.
For fans at Dragonsteel Nexus, that means more than just a weekend of panels. It’s a front-row preview of multiple Sanderson eras in motion at once—and, with London on the horizon, a sign that the Cosmere’s center of gravity is no longer confined to Utah.
