Penni Russon

Penni Russon is an Australian author of children's and young adult fiction, born in 1974 in Tasmania. She began her career as a poet before publishing Undine in 2004, the opening novel of a trilogy continued in Breathe and Drift, about a teenager who discovers she can control water and finds herself drawn into a legacy connecting the human and fairy worlds. Her later novel The Endsister won the 2018 Aurealis Award for best children's fiction, following an earlier Aurealis shortlisting for Undine. Russon studied at Monash University and RMIT University, later completing a PhD examining comics as a therapeutic tool for youth mental health. Alongside her novels she works as a freelance editor and has written extensively for younger readers beyond the Undine series.