Anne Ursu

Anne Ursu is an American novelist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, who teaches in Hamline University's low-residency MFA program in writing for children and young adults. She is best known for the Cronus Chronicles, a middle-grade fantasy trilogy (The Shadow Thieves, The Siren Song, The Immortal Fire) that sends contemporary child protagonists into an irreverent, present-day version of Greek mythology. Her later novel Breadcrumbs, a reimagining of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen set in modern Minnesota, and The Real Boy, a fairy-tale-inflected story about a magician's apprentice, both drew wide critical praise, with The Real Boy longlisted for the National Book Award in 2013. More recent work includes The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy and Not Quite a Ghost. Ursu's fiction consistently reworks classic myth and fairy tale into emotionally grounded contemporary stories for young readers.