Ava Reid

Ava Reid is an American author of fantasy for young adult and adult readers, born in Manhattan in 1996. Her early novels, including The Wolf and the Woodsman (2021) and Juniper & Thorn (2022), draw on Jewish folklore and Slavic myth to build dark, atmospheric fairy-tale worlds. A Study in Drowning (2023) shifted to a Welsh-inflected academic setting steeped in mythology and rivalry between students, and has been compared by critics to the work of Shirley Jackson and Kelly Link. She has since moved toward harder speculative fiction: Fable for the End of the World (2025) is a near-future novel set in a climate-ravaged, corporate surveillance state, following a young woman conscripted into a televised contest with lethal stakes. Reid's fiction is generally ambitious in scope, weaving myth, history, and, increasingly, contemporary anxieties about environmental collapse and control into densely imagined settings.