Leigh Bardugo is an Israeli-American author, born in Jerusalem in 1975 and raised in Los Angeles, one of the most successful fantasy novelists of the past decade.
A Yale graduate who worked in copywriting, journalism and film make-up before publishing, she made her debut in 2012 with Shadow and Bone and built from it the Grishaverse, an interconnected world of elemental magic and Tsarist-Russian flavour. The original Shadow and Bone trilogy follows the orphan soldier Alina Starkov, who discovers a rare power to summon light in the war-torn nation of Ravka; the Six of Crows duology, a razor-sharp heist story led by the scheming Kaz Brekker and his crew of outcasts, is often held up as her finest work; and the King of Scars books continue the saga. Netflix adapted the world into the series Shadow and Bone.
She has also written for adults, most notably Ninth House, which sends the troubled Alex Stern to police the secret occult societies of Yale. Living with a condition that sometimes requires a cane - the inspiration for Kaz's own injury - she brings to her fiction a keen sympathy for outsiders and the underestimated.
