Alix E. Harrow

Alix E. Harrow was born on November 9, 1989, in Idaho and grew up in Kentucky. She started college at 16 at Berea College and finished a history degree in three years. She then earned a master's in history at the University of Vermont.

The classroom came before the fiction. She taught African and African American history as an adjunct at Eastern Kentucky University. That historian's eye shows up in almost everything she writes: settings tied to a specific era, and characters who deal in books, archives and official versions of events.

Her first short stories appeared starting in 2014. The breakthrough was "A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies," about a librarian who uses books to help a boy get away. It won the 2019 Hugo.

Her first novel came out the same year. The Ten Thousand Doors of January follows a girl in the early 1900s who finds a book about doors to other worlds. It made the final ballots for the Hugo, the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award. In 2020 came The Once and Future Witches, about three sisters who bring witchcraft back in the middle of the fight for women's suffrage. It won the British Fantasy Award for best novel.

Next she had fun with fairy tales in two short novellas, A Spindle Splintered and A Mirror Mended, which drag Sleeping Beauty and Snow White into the present with plenty of humor. In 2023 she went back to Kentucky with Starling House, a gothic tale about a mysterious house in a small town.

The Everlasting (2025) blends time travel with knightly legend. It won her the 2026 Hugo for Best Novel at the Worldcon in Anaheim. She lives in Virginia. Readers know the pattern by now: women who rewrite their own fate, passages between worlds, and the question of who decides which version of history survives.