Daniel Kraus

Daniel Kraus was born on June 7, 1975, in Midland, Michigan, and grew up in Fairfield, a small town in Iowa. He went to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and now lives in Chicago with his wife. Before his name got around, he spent a good while on the other side of the shelves: in 2012 he became the Books for Youth editor at Booklist, one of the main review magazines for American libraries.

He debuted in 2009 with The Monster Variations, and young adult horror became his home. Rotters, from 2011, follows a boy who moves in with the father he barely knows and finds out the man robs graves for a living. Scowler, from 2013, takes the fear out to an isolated farm. The audiobooks of both won the Odyssey Award, in 2012 and 2014.

Then came the collaborations that put him on Hollywood's map. With Guillermo del Toro he wrote Trollhunters in 2015, which became a Netflix animated series, and the novel of The Shape of Water in 2018, developed alongside the film. With George A. Romero, the father of the modern zombie, he wrote The Living Dead in 2020, built from a book the director left unfinished when he died in 2017. Pay the Piper, another project from the pair, followed in 2024.

Kraus writes a lot and on many fronts. There is The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch duology, about a boy killed in 1896 who comes back, the children's series They, illustrated by Rovina Cai, and a shelf of comics such as Autumnal and The Cemeterians. Whalefall, from 2023, traps the reader inside a sperm whale: a 17-year-old diver gets swallowed and has little oxygen left to get out. It won the Alex Award and is being adapted for film by Imagine Entertainment.

The big leap came with Angel Down in 2025. During the Meuse-Argonne offensive of World War I, a soldier who once dodged the draft finds an angel on the battlefield. The whole novel is one sentence. In May 2026 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction over Katie Kitamura's Audition and Torrey Peters' Stag Dance. Imagine picked up the film rights to this one as well.

2026 also brought The Sixth Nik and Partially Devoured, his first nonfiction book.