New York Times best-selling speculative fiction author Maggie Stiefvater is best known for her series of fantasy novels “The Wolves of Mercy Falls” and “The Raven Cycle.” “The Wolves of Mercy Falls” consists of “Shiver,” “Linger,” “Forever,” and “Sinner.” “Shiver” remained on The New York Times bestseller list for more than 40 weeks in 2009, selling over 130,000 copies in that one year alone. Since publication, it has been licensed in more than 36 foreign territories.
“The Raven Cycle,” which started off as a handwritten concept when Stiefvater was 19, contains four contemporary fantasy novels: “The Raven Boys,” “The Dream Thieves,” “Blue Lily, Lily Blue,” and “The Raven King.” She has also published “The Scorpio Races,” which earned several starred reviews and was named a Michael L. Printz Award Honor Book. A talented musician and bagpipes player, Stiefvater also composed the intro and outro music for her audiobooks.
Born Heidi Hummel, Stiefvater changed her name to Margaret at age 16. She began her prolific writing career as a child and by 16 was submitting manuscripts to publishers. After being homeschooled, she attended Mary Washington College, graduating with a degree in history. Upon entering college, she had already written more than 30 novels.
Before becoming a full-time writer, Stiefvater was a car journalist and a portrait artist. As a promotion for “The Dream Thieves,” she spray painted a giant knife on her Mitsubishi Evo —she’s also heavily into the car tuning world and has been published in Road & Track magazine — to match the one in the book. For her portrait work, she specializes in colored pencil; she has also created a Tarot card deck, The Raven's Prophecy Tarot Cards.
Stiefvater suffers from Addison’s disease, a rare condition that causes extreme fatigue, weakness, confusion, and delirium if left untreated. After finally receiving a diagnosis, she considered it the equivalent of a fairytale curse being lifted. In a blog post, she said, “This isn’t really how medicine should work, it’s how magic should work, and yet, this is what happened: They gave me replacement cortisol, and in thirty minutes, the world was in color.”
She dedicated her novel “Call Down the Hawk” to “the magicians who woke me from my thousand-year sleep,” which is a reference to this experience.
“Call Down the Hawk” is the first book of “The Dreamer” trilogy, followed by “Mister Impossible” and, most recently in 2022, “Greywaren.”