Sunrise on the Reaping

Suzanne Collins is daughter of a U.S. Air Force officer who served in both the Korean and Vietnam Wars. During her childhood, Collins spent time living in Brussels, Belgium and the eastern United States. In 1985, she graduated from Indiana University Bloomington with double degrees in theater and telecommunications. She went on to attend the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, where she earned her Master of Fine Arts in dramatic writing in 1989. Collins began her career writing for children’s television. Over the years she has worked for Nickelodeon, Scholastic Entertainment, and Warner Bros’ Kids programming. Her first children’s novel, Gregor the Overlander, was published in 2003. Collins went on to pen four more books in The Underland Chronicles, which became a New York Times best-selling series. Her dystopian young adult series, The Hunger Games, began publication in 2008. As Collins’s most well-known series, it includes an original trilogy—The Hunger Games (2008), Catching Fire (2009), and Mockingjay (2010)—plus two prequels—The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2020) and Sunrise on the Reaping (2025). As an international bestseller, The Hunger Games series has been translated in 55 languages and inspired numerous film adaptations starring Jennifer Lawrence, Woody Harrelson, and Donald Sutherland. In 2016, she became the first YA author to receive the Authors Guild Award for Distinguished Service to the Literary Community, which singles out writers whose literature has created lifelong book lovers. Collins lives in Newtown, Connecticut with her two children.

Suzanne Collins’s original inspiration for The Hunger Games was the dissonant experience of witnessing televised coverage of the Iraq War alongside reality TV shows. The Iraq War began in 2003 when a coalition of nations led by the United States staged a military invasion of Iraq. The invasion’s stated objectives were deposing dictator Saddam Hussein and locating and destroying Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. U.S. involvement in Iraq, which lasted until 2011, drew significant criticism regarding alleged human rights violations and the administration’s reliance on false claims and propaganda. For Sunrise on the Reaping (2025), Collins drew on Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume’s notion of implicit submission, which discusses “the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.” Convinced that public opinion was the root of political power, Hume invited readers to critically reflect on their resignation to the status quo and to question whether they had the power to change it. Likewise, the surge of misinformation in the 20th century is relevant to Haymitch’s struggle to present a true narrative of the Games despite the Capitol’s manipulative propaganda. The advent of the internet and lack of widespread digital media literacy has caused an epidemic of “fake news” in recent decades, making it difficult for citizens to distinguish between truth and falsehood and undermining public trust in the media.

Collins’s other prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2020), follows a young Coriolanus Snow’s descent into manipulation and depravity. Both prequels explore the lead-up to the world that Collins portrays in her original Hunger Games series (The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay). Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s 2023 novel Chain-Gang All-Stars explores similar themes of dehumanization and resistance in the context of highly-publicized gladiator games played by prison inmates. For another look at surveillance states and authoritarian governments, Where the Axe is Buried (2025) by Ray Nayler explores the potential effects of artificial intelligence on human freedom. Sabaa Tahir’s An Ember in the Ashes (2015) reflects on collective resistance and individual risk within a totalitarian government. For readers interested in the effects of propaganda, All Better Now (2025) by Neal Shusterman imagines a world in which those in power strive to convince people that being happy all the time is dangerous. For a more realistic story of political rebellion, Julia Alvarez’s 1994 novel In the Time of the Butterflies reimagines the true story of the three Mirabal sisters who, in 1960, were murdered for their participation in a plot to overthrow the Trujillo government in the Dominican Republic. Finally, political scientist Thomas Rid’s Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (2020) explores the dangerous power of misinformation in the real world.