Lauren Oliver

Lauren Oliver, born Laura Suzanne Schechter on November 8, 1982, is an American author best known for young adult novels that mix suspense, high emotion, and speculative ideas. Born in Queens and raised in Westchester, New York, she grew up in a home where books and invention were part of daily life. Her father is true crime writer Harold Schechter, and both of her parents are literature professors. From an early age, she was encouraged to make up stories, draw, paint, dance in costumes, and spend much of her time living imaginatively.

Oliver’s first novel, Before I Fall, was published on March 2, 2010, by HarperCollins in the United States and by Hodder & Stoughton in the United Kingdom. The book follows Sam, a teenage girl who relives the last day of her life seven times, learning new values and uncovering the mysteries around her death. Oliver wrote the book on her BlackBerry while riding the subway to meetings, emailing chapters to herself so she could keep working on them later. In 2017, Before I Fall was released as a major motion picture, with Zoey Deutch playing Samantha Kingston.

She went on to write the Delirium trilogy: Delirium, Pandemonium, and Requiem. The series was expanded through the novellas Hana, Annabel, and Raven, which gave added perspectives and backstory to the events of the novels. Oliver also wrote for younger readers, including Liesl & Po, a 2012 E. B. White Read Aloud Award nominee, and The Spindlers, about a girl who enters a fantastical underworld to save her younger brother.

In 2014, Oliver published Panic, a young adult contemporary novel about Heather and Dodge, two recent high school graduates in the impoverished small town of Carp. The story centers on a dangerous summer game played after graduation, with challenges that become more life-threatening and a cash prize that offers the winner a chance to escape poverty. Panic was later adapted into a television series released by Amazon Prime Video, with Oliver serving as creator, writer, and showrunner. Her other books include the adult novel Rooms, the teen thriller Vanishing Girls, Replica, and the Curiosity House series, written with H. C. Chester.

Oliver’s education and family background helped shape her way of seeing stories. She graduated from the University of Chicago, where she studied philosophy and literature and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, then earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from New York University. In 2010, she co-founded Paper Lantern Lit, later called Glasstown Entertainment, with Razorbill editor and poet Lexa Hillyer. In 2019, she became president of Glasstown West, the company’s film and TV division, while also beginning work on Hookline, an aggregate platform of social AR iconography.

Her novels have been translated into more than thirty languages, and with Lexa Hillyer she has authored and developed more than one hundred original books and TV and film scripts. Oliver’s work often begins with a sharp question: what if a girl had to repeat the day she died, what if love were treated as a disease, what if fear became a public contest, what if two sisters could no longer trust what had happened between them. That direct pressure gives her stories their pull. Her words continue to speak to readers because they stay close to choice, danger, memory, and the ache of not wanting to let characters go.