Born 1975 · 3 quotes
Leigh Bardugo is an American fantasy author born in 1975. She is best known for her young adult Grishaverse novels, including the Shadow and Bone trilogy and the Six of Crows and King of Scars duologies. Her words are worth reading because her work has earned acclaim and reached wider audiences through Netflix and Amazon Studios adaptations.
“Many boys will bring you flowers. But someday you'll meet a boy who will learn your favorite flower, your favorite song, your favorite sweet. And even if he is too poor to give you any of them, it won't matter because he will have taken the time to know you as no one else does. Only that boy earns your heart.”
Leigh Bardugo, born April 6, 1975, is an American fantasy author best known for the Grishaverse, a connected body of young adult novels that includes the Shadow and Bone trilogy, the Six of Crows duology, and the King of Scars duology. She was born in Jerusalem and grew up in Los Angeles, California, where she was raised by her grandparents. Bardugo is Jewish, descended from Spanish Jews on one side and Russian and Lithuanian Jews on the other, and she has described herself as a secular Jew.
Bardugo attended Yale University and graduated with a degree in English in 1997. She was a member of the Wolf’s Head secret society. Before publishing fiction, she worked in copywriting and journalism, as well as makeup and special effects. Those varied early jobs placed her close to language, image, and performance before her novels reached a wide readership. Her own life also entered her fiction in a specific way: in the acknowledgments of Six of Crows, she revealed that she has osteonecrosis and sometimes needs to use a cane, which helped inspire Kaz Brekker, the master thief and gang boss who uses a cane in that book.
Her debut novel, Shadow and Bone, was published by Macmillan in 2012 as the first book in the Grisha trilogy. Bardugo has defined its genre as “Tsarpunk,” fantasy inspired by early-19th-century Russia. The novel was nominated for the Romantic Times Book Award and the South Carolina Children’s Book Award, was named an Indie Next List Book, was reviewed in The New York Times, and reached number 8 on The New York Times Best Seller list. The trilogy continued with Siege and Storm in 2013 and Ruin and Rising in 2014.
Bardugo expanded the same universe with Six of Crows in 2015 and Crooked Kingdom in 2016. Six of Crows was named a New York Times Notable Book and an ALA-YALSA Top Ten Pick of 2016. In 2017, Macmillan published The Language of Thorns, a collection of Grisha fairy tales and folk tales. That same year, Penguin Random House published her DC Icons novel Wonder Woman: Warbringer. Her first adult novel, Ninth House, appeared in 2019 from Flatiron Books, won the 2019 Goodreads Choice Award for best fantasy novel, and began the Alex Stern series. Its sequel, Hell Bent, was published in January 2023.
Her books have also moved beyond print. In 2012, DreamWorks acquired movie rights to Shadow and Bone, though the project was not realized. In 2019, Netflix ordered an eight-episode series based on Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows; Bardugo made a cameo appearance in the third episode and served as an executive producer. Amazon Studios announced in 2019 that it would adapt Ninth House, with Bardugo also set to executive produce. In 2024, Flatiron Books published The Familiar, a historical fantasy set in Spain during the Spanish Golden Age.
Bardugo’s work has been translated into 22 languages and published in more than 50 countries, and she was ranked the sixth most popular author between 2016 and 2021 on Goodreads. Her appeal rests in the clarity of her imagined worlds, the sharpness of her characters, and the way personal history, scholarship, genre craft, and visual storytelling meet on the page. For readers collecting memorable lines, her fiction offers speech shaped by danger, wit, pain, and ambition, the kind of writing that keeps finding new audiences in books and on screen.
Source: Wikipedia · Photo: Wikimedia Commons
