Kelly Barnhill is an American novelist, born in 1973 and based in Minneapolis, whose fiction moves between luminous fantasy for children and fierce, fable-like novels for adults.
A former teacher, park ranger and bartender who came to writing sideways, she published poetry, non-fiction and three well-regarded novels including The Witch's Boy before The Girl Who Drank the Moon transformed her career, winning the 2017 Newbery Medal, American children's literature's highest honour.
It tells of a town that sacrifices a baby each year to a witch in the forest, unaware that Xan the witch is kindly and rescues the infants; when she accidentally feeds one baby moonlight instead of starlight, filling her with dangerous magic, she raises the girl, Luna, herself, in a story about sorrow weaponised, memory suppressed and love as an unruly force, told in prose reviewers routinely called spellbinding. A New York Times bestseller, it has become a modern classic of the enmagicked-child school.
Her later books include The Ogress and the Orphans, a parable about generosity, a town's forgetting how to be kind, and a lie-telling mayor, and for adults When Women Were Dragons, in which the fury of 1950s women erupts in mass draconic transformation, and The Crane Husband, a dark reweaving of the crane wife folktale.
She has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and won the World Fantasy Award for her novella The Unlicensed Magician.
