Nicholas Charles Sparks is an American romance novelist, screenwriter, and film producer. He has published twenty-three novels, all New York Times bestsellers, and two works of non-fiction, with over 115 million copies sold worldwide in more than 50 languages.

Sparks grew up mainly in north-central California, where his family moved when he was eight. He attended the University of Notre Dame on a track scholarship, but an injury ended his budding athletic career and induced him to write his first (unpublished) novel. He graduated (1988) with a major in business and held a variety of jobs, including pharmaceutical salesman. In the early 1990s he and his wife settled in New Bern, North Carolina, which later provided a setting for his novels.

While working his day job, Sparks continued to write. He began a collaboration with former Olympic runner Billy Mills on Wokini: A Lakota Journey to Happiness and Self-Understanding. The book, which was inspired by a Native American legend, was published in 1990. Determined to become a professional writer, Sparks spent several months working on The Notebook, his first published novel, which hit The New York Times best-seller list immediately after it reached the public in 1996. By the time the film adaptation was released in 2004, Sparks had published seven more novels, two of which, Message in a Bottle (1998) and A Walk to Remember (1999), had already arrived in cinemas, in 1999 and 2002, respectively. Sparks saw a number of other novels adapted for the screen, including Nights in Rodanthe (2002; film 2008), Dear John (2006; film 2010), The Choice (2007; film 2016), The Last Song (2009; film 2010), The Lucky One (2008; film 2012), The Best of Me (2011; film 2014), and The Longest Ride (2013; film 2015). In 2015 he released the novel See Me, about a pair of lovers with troubled pasts. Later works included Two by Two (2016), Every Breath (2018), and The Return (2020).

Although Sparks’s fiction usually involved love stories, he rejected the suggestion that he was a “romance novelist.” His supporters agreed that although romance played a role in his works, Sparks explored more-serious subject matter, such as loneliness, grief, obsession, and loss, and that many of his books featured poignant, less-than-happy endings. That was also evident in his only nonfiction work, Three Weeks with My Brother (2004), in which he and his brother, Micah, shared their own emotional responses to the deaths of their parents and sister.

Sparks, a devout Roman Catholic, devoted much of his time and literary profits to writing programs at Notre Dame and to charitable causes, most notably the Nicholas Sparks Foundation, which he and his wife established in 2011. The related Epiphany School for Global Studies, a coeducational college preparatory school “rooted in the Christian faith,” opened in 2006 in New Bern.