Caighlan Smith Books in Order

If you want her best-known myth retelling: Children of Icarus → Children of Daedala
If you want ghost hunters in a ruined world: Hallow Hour → New Year → Firefly → Into Surreality
If you want a quick taste of her short fiction: The Weather → A Pest Most Fiendish

Caighlan Smith was born in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, and grew up in nearby St. Philip's, a coastal community looking out over the North Atlantic. A lot of the things that show up in her fiction were there early: a love of stories, a taste for the strange, and a child-sized certainty that magic might be real if you looked in the right place. She has spoken about building pillow mazes, telling stories to family and friends, and heading off on trips with very specific goals, like finding a leprechaun or a troll.

She knew young that writing wasn't just a pastime.

By her own account, she decided she wanted to be a novelist at nine. By thirteen she had already written a 550-page fantasy novel, and at seventeen she wrote Hallow Hour, the book that became her first published novel. It arrived when she was still very young, but it already carried the mix that would become familiar in her work: danger, motion, monsters, and teenagers forced to grow up fast.

At Memorial University of Newfoundland, Smith studied English and Classics. That combination fits her books well. The English side sharpened her sense of story and character, while the Classics side fed her long-standing fascination with Greek myth. She has said that what she loves about myth is its flexibility. There is never just one final version, and every retelling opens another way into the same old story.

Travel and public speaking have been part of her path, too. As a young writer she appeared at literary events, read to school audiences in Newfoundland and Labrador, and took part in work connected to Teachers Action for Girls, including reading to girls in Uganda on International Day of the Girl Child. Those details help explain why her fiction often feels outward-looking even when the settings are closed, dangerous, or claustrophobic.

Her best-known novel is probably Children of Icarus, a dark YA fantasy that reworks the Icarus and Daedalus myth into a brutal labyrinth survival story. It won the Scottish Teenage Book Prize in 2018, and its sequel, Children of Daedala, pushes deeper into the maze and the tangled loyalties inside it. Readers who click with Smith's work often seem to like that balance of myth and momentum. The books move quickly, but the characters are never just props for the plot.

Myth is only part of the picture.

Beginning with Hallow Hour, her Surreality books lean into ghosts, phantom hunters, and post-apocalyptic landscapes. They have a strong forward rush, almost like the energy of an adventure game turned into prose, but they keep circling back to loyalty, family, and what survival costs. Her shorter fiction shows more range again. The Weather is quieter and eerie, while A Pest Most Fiendish has a brisker, more playful feel, with gadgets, supernatural pests, and a steampunk edge.

Smith's academic life has grown alongside her fiction rather than away from it. After Memorial, she studied fantasy at the University of Glasgow as a Saltire Scholar and later returned to Memorial for doctoral work in English. In 2022 she received a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship for research on hero narratives in video games, and her recent scholarly work has focused on power, gender, monstrosity, and the stories popular culture tells about who gets to count as a hero.

That through line makes sense. Whether Smith is writing about a girl trapped in a labyrinth, a band of hunters crossing a ghost-haunted landscape, or the politics hiding inside game narratives, she tends to be interested in people under pressure. Her protagonists are often young, but they are rarely simple. They have to adapt, doubt, survive, and keep moving. That gives her work a particular feel: myth-minded but modern, dark without losing its sense of wonder, and always curious about who comes out the other side of the maze.