Naomi Novik is an American fantasy novelist, born in New York in 1973, whose inventive reworkings of history and folklore have made her one of the most decorated writers in the field.
A former computer programmer - she studied English at Brown and computer science at Columbia, and worked on the video game Neverwinter Nights before writing full time - she also helped found the Organization for Transformative Works and its fan-fiction Archive of Our Own, a lasting service to online storytelling.
She made her name with Temeraire, a nine-book alternate history that refights the Napoleonic Wars with an aerial corps of dragons, beginning with His Majesty's Dragon. She then turned to the standalone fairy tales that many consider her finest work: Uprooted, steeped in Polish folklore, and Spinning Silver, a glinting reimagining of Rumpelstiltskin. Her Scholomance trilogy, opening with A Deadly Education, brought a mordant wit to dark-academia fantasy, following the wary young sorceress El Higgins through a school where survival is anything but assured.
Her honours include the Nebula Award for Uprooted and three Locus Awards, and she was named the year's best new writer at the start of her career. She lives in New York with her husband, the writer Charles Ardai, their daughter and, as she likes to put it, six computers.
