Marie Lu

Marie Lu, born Xiwei Lu on July 11, 1984, is an American author of young adult science fiction and fantasy. She was born in Wuxi, Jiangsu, China, later moved to Beijing, and came to the United States with her family in 1989, when she was five years old, during the Tiananmen Square Protest. She grew up between Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Houston. As a child learning English, she wrote stories, an early habit that became part of the path toward her career as a novelist.

Lu is best known for the Legend series, a set of novels placed in a dystopian and militarized future. The first book, Legend, was published on November 29, 2011, and opened a young adult science fiction trilogy. It was followed by Prodigy and Champion, both published in 2013. Later works in that same line include the novellas Life Before Legend, Life After Legend, and Life After Legend II, as well as Rebel, published on October 1, 2019.

The idea behind Legend came in part from the film Les Miserables. Lu has said she wanted to recreate, in a teenage version, the conflict between Valjean and Javert. That source of inspiration fits the tension that marks the series: pursuit, divided loyalties, and young people living under the pressure of a militarized society. Her own education also brought together different fields. At the University of Southern California, she studied political science and biology, and she interned as an artist at Disney Interactive Studios.

After Legend, Lu continued to build a wide body of young adult fiction. Her first fantasy series began with The Young Elites, published on October 7, 2014, followed by The Rose Society in 2015 and The Midnight Star in 2016. She also wrote the Warcross series, made up of Warcross and Wildcard, and the Skyhunter series, made up of Skyhunter and Steelstriker. Her other books include Batman: Nightwalker in the DC Icons series, The Evertree in the Spirit Animals series, and the standalone novel The Kingdom of Back.

Lu’s work has also extended beyond novels. She and her husband, Primo Gallanosa, worked together on a game called Fuzz Academy, which was shut down after being hacked. She currently lives in the Arts District of Los Angeles with her husband, their son, born in 2019, and three dogs. For readers, her appeal comes from the clear shape of her imagined worlds and the human conflicts at their center. Her fiction often begins with young characters under pressure, and that gives her writing a directness that stays with the people who read it.