Kiran Millwood Hargrave Books in Order

If you want her signature mythic middle grade: The Girl of Ink and Stars / The Cartographer's Daughter → The Island at the End of Everything → The Way Past Winter
If you want a darker YA read: The Deathless Girls
If you want adult historical fiction: The Mercies → The Dance Tree
If you want a tender family adventure: Julia and the Shark → A Secret of Birds & Bone
If you want a sweeping adult love story: Almost Life

Kiran Millwood Hargrave was born in Surrey in 1990, and stories were around her early. She grew up in a family that travelled widely. Trips to India, where much of her mother's family lives, and a visit to La Gomera in her late teens would both leave clear tracks in the landscapes, folklore, and weather of her fiction.

Books came first.

Writing came a little later.

She has said that becoming an author was not really the plan when she was younger. For a while she thought she might study law. Then, in her twenties, watching her partner, artist Tom de Freston, build a life around art pushed her to ask what she actually cared about most. Her father's advice helped too, that you might as well fail at something you want to do. So she turned toward books, began publishing poetry, and joined the Creative Writing MSt at Oxford, where her first novel started to take shape.

Before fiction made her widely known, she was already busy in poetry and theatre. She published the pamphlet Scavengers and the collection Last March, created with the Scott Polar Research Institute to mark the centenary of Captain Scott's final expedition. Her poem Grace won the Yeovil International Poetry Prize in 2013, and her play BOAT, about human trafficking, reached the stage in 2015. That early work helps explain the pull of her later books, close attention to image, rhythm, and the body under stress.

Then came Isabella.

Her first novel, The Girl of Ink and Stars / The Cartographer's Daughter, made a big entrance in 2016. Readers loved its mix of maps, myths, danger, and a girl who refuses to stay small, and the book went on to win the Waterstones Children's Book Prize and the British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year. It also set a pattern for much of her fiction, brave young protagonists, places that feel half real and half legendary, and emotional stakes that never get lost beneath the adventure.

She kept building from there. The Island at the End of Everything looks at exile, prejudice, and a daughter's love for her mother through the story of Ami, a child torn from her island home. The Way Past Winter turns snow, wolves, and a rescue quest into a fierce story of sisterhood, while A Secret of Birds & Bone brings plague-ridden Siena to life through bones, birds, and family secrecy. The worlds are vivid and strange, but the feelings are direct.

Her books for older readers lean darker, but they keep the same emotional clarity. In The Deathless Girls, she reimagines Dracula's brides through the lives of twin sisters taken from their Traveller community. The Mercies, inspired by the Vardø storm and the 1621 witch trials in Norway, showed how interested she is in women under pressure, harsh landscapes, and the way fear can harden into violence. Later adult novels, including The Dance Tree and Almost Life, move from historical unrest to a sweeping love story spread across decades.

She also works beautifully in collaboration. Julia and the Shark, created with illustrations by de Freston, brings together science, family strain, wonder, and the deep sea in a story that feels both intimate and huge. Now the couple live in Oxford with their daughter and two cats. Across everything Hargrave writes, the thread is steady: myth alongside real history, wild places that feel almost alive, and people learning what courage looks like when the world turns strange.