Heather Fawcett Books in Order

If you want faerie lore and adult fantasy: Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries → Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands → Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales
If you want high-stakes YA adventure: Even the Darkest Stars → All the Wandering Light
If you want a witchy, classic-feeling middle grade: The Grace of Wild Things
If you want dragons and snowy adventure: Ember and the Ice Dragons
If you want cozy magic with cats: Agnes Aubert's Mystical Cat Shelter

Heather Fawcett is a Canadian fantasy writer who was born in Vancouver and now lives on Vancouver Island. She writes for adults, teens, and younger readers, and her books range from faerie scholarship and mountain expeditions to witches, dragons, and very opinionated cats.

Books came early.

She has said she grew up in a family that loved stories, and that her parents read to her when she was very young. The first book she remembers reading is The Hobbit, and A Wizard of Earthsea was the book that made her want to become a writer. That early mix of folklore, fantasy, and big imaginative worlds still shows up all through her work.

Before publishing novels, Fawcett studied both sides of her imagination. She earned a master's degree in English literature and a bachelor's degree in archaeology, then worked a string of jobs that sound almost like clues to the books she would later write: archaeologist, photographer, technical writer, and backstage assistant for a Shakespearean theater festival. It helps explain why her fiction often feels both bookish and hands-on. Her stories love research, old lore, and strange systems, but they also care about weather, travel, practical survival, and people trying to do difficult things under pressure.

Dragons keep turning up.

Her early novels for teens and middle grade readers already show the shape of the career. Even the Darkest Stars and All the Wandering Light follow Kamzin, a young climber in a wintry empire, through dangerous expeditions, family strain, and magic with real consequences. Ember and the Ice Dragons takes a dragon girl to Antarctica and turns a cold, remote setting into a place of danger and found family. The Language of Ghosts and The School Between Winter and Fairyland both center smart, determined young heroes who have to untangle power, loyalty, and hidden histories.

Then came The Grace of Wild Things, a witchy, funny, tender reworking of Anne of Green Gables. It is a good example of what readers often like most in Fawcett's books: warmth without softness, humor without snark, and young characters who are imaginative but never flimsy. Even when her stories are cozy on the surface, there is usually a harder edge underneath.

Her adult work widened that audience. Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries and the rest of the Emily Wilde series brought her scholarly fantasy, dry humor, and deep love of folklore to a large adult readership, while Agnes Aubert's Mystical Cat Shelter leaned into cozy fantasy with 1920s Montreal, magic, and rescue cats. Across age categories, the through line is pretty clear: Fawcett likes capable, slightly awkward people, complicated magic, cold places, and myths that bite back.

Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages and have been nominated for awards including the Hugo, Locus, Mythopoeic, and Silver Birch. She still lives on Vancouver Island, and that west coast mix of sea, weather, and wild landscape feels close to the spirit of her fiction, even when the story itself heads somewhere much stranger.