Card is the son of Willard Richards Card and Peggy Jane (nee Park), the third of six children and the older brother of composer and arranger Arlen Card. Card was born in Richland, Washington, and grew up in Santa Clara, California as well as Mesa, Arizona and Orem, Utah. He served as a missionary for the LDS Church in Brazil and graduated from Brigham Young University (BYU) and the University of Utah; he also spent a year in a Ph.D. program at the University of Notre Dame. For part of the 1970s Card worked as an associate editor of the Ensign, an official magazine of the LDS Church.
Science fiction
He wrote the short story "Ender's Game" while working at the BYU press, and submitted it to several publications. The idea for the later novel of the same title came from the short story about a school where boys can fight in space. It was eventually purchased by Ben Bova at Analog Science Fiction and Fact and published in the August 1977 issue. Meanwhile, he started writing half-hour audioplays on LDS Church history, the New Testament, and other subjects for Living Scriptures in Ogden, Utah; on the basis of that continuing contract, some freelance editing work, and a novel contract for Hot Sleep and A Planet Called Treason, he left Ensign and began supporting his family as a freelancer.  He completed his master's degree in English at the University of Utah in 1981 and began a doctoral program at the University of Notre Dame, but the recession of the early 1980s caused the flow of new book contracts to temporarily dry up. He returned to full-time employment as the book editor for Compute! magazine in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1983. In October of that year, a new contract for the Alvin Maker "trilogy" (now up to six books) allowed him to return to freelancing.  Ender's Game and its sequel Speaker for the Dead were both awarded the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, making Card the only author (as of 2015) to win both of science fiction's top prizes in consecutive years. Card continued the series with Xenocide, Children of the Mind, Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, "First Meetings in the Enderverse", Shadow of the Giant, A War of Gifts, and Ender in Exile, a book that takes place after Ender's Game and before Speaker for the Dead. Card has also announced his plan to write Shadows Alive, a book that connects the "Shadow" series and "Speaker" series together. Shadows in Flight serves as a bridge towards this final book. He also co-wrote the formic war novels: Earth Unaware, Earth Afire, Earth Awakens and The Swarm as prequels to the Ender novels, with two more novels in the pipeline, which will result in two prequel formic war trilogies. These trilogies relay, among other things, the history of Mazer Rackham. Children of the Fleet is the first novel in a new sequel series, called Fleet School. In 2008 Card announced that Ender's Game would be made into a movie, but that he did not have a director lined up (Wolfgang Petersen had previously been scheduled to direct the movie but subsequently moved on to other projects.) It was to be produced by Chartoff Productions, and Card was writing the screenplay himself. The film was made several years later, and released in 2013, with Asa Butterfield in the title role and Gavin Hood directing.  Other works include the alternative histories The Tales of Alvin Maker, Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, The Homecoming Saga, and Hidden Empire, a story about a near-future civil war in the United States, based on the Xbox Live Arcade video game Shadow Complex. He collaborated with Star Wars artist Doug Chiang on Robota and with Kathryn H. Kidd on Lovelock.  In 2017, he co-created a TV series Extinct.

Q: When did Card start writing science fiction?
A: was eventually purchased by Ben Bova at Analog Science Fiction and Fact and published in the August 1977 issue.

Q: What was the name of the story Analog published in August 1977?
A: He wrote the short story "Ender's Game" while working at the BYU press,
So, Ender's Game was first published in Analog magazine--when did it become a book?
Ender's Game and its sequel Speaker for the Dead were both awarded the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award,
Ender's Game and its sequel Speaker for the Dead were both awarded the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award,