Kiran Millwood Hargrave

writer and playwright

Kiran Millwood Hargrave (* 1990) is an internationally renowned British author, poet, and playwright. She has written more than a dozen books for readers of all ages, and her works have been translated into more than thirty languages. Her children’s and young adult books are marked by poetic language, strong female characters, and a blend of history, nature, and fantasy. They include the Geomancer trilogy (2023–2025), A Secret of Birds & Bone (2020), and The Girl of Ink & Stars (2016), which won the Waterstones Children’s Prize and was named the British Book Awards Children’s Book of the Year. She has also written two acclaimed children’s books – Julia and the Shark (2021) and Leila and the Blue Fox (2022) – in collaboration with her husband, the artist Tom de Freston. Her debut adult novel The Mercies (2020), set in seventeenth-century Norway and inspired by a witch trial that took place there in 1621, was a Sunday Times best-seller and won the Betty Trask Award, among other accolades. Her latest novel, Almost Life (2026), is an intimate love story about two women whose lives repeatedly intersect over the course of several decades. It explores love, desire, and the opportunities in life that people fail to seize.