Stephenie Meyer

Stephenie Morgan was born on December 24, 1973, in Hartford, Connecticut, but grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, and went to Chaparral High School in Scottsdale. She earned a degree in English literature from Brigham Young University in Utah in 1997. In 1994 she married Christian Meyer, whose last name she took, and she is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which she has called her biggest influence. Before Twilight, she had never published anything.

It all started with a dream on June 2, 2003. In it, an ordinary girl talked in a meadow with a vampire who loved her and also craved her blood. Meyer woke up and wrote the scene down. It became chapter 13 of the book. She then followed the story to the end and only afterward went back to write the first twelve chapters. At the time she was home raising young sons and writing in her spare hours, with no plan to publish.

She sent fifteen query letters to literary agents. Five got no answer, nine were rejections, and one came back positive, from Jodi Reamer at Writers House. Eight publishers bid on the book at auction, and in November 2003 she signed a $750,000 three-book deal with Little, Brown.

Twilight hit shelves in 2005. Bella Swan moves to rainy Forks, Washington, and falls for Edward Cullen, a classmate with secrets. New Moon followed in 2006, Eclipse in 2007 and Breaking Dawn in 2008. The series deals with love, choice and self-control, and each book talks back to a classic, from Pride and Prejudice to Wuthering Heights. In 2008 USA Today named her Author of the Year and Time put her on its list of the 100 most influential people. Breaking Dawn won the British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year in 2009.

That same year, 2008, she published The Host, adult science fiction about an Earth occupied by aliens who take over human bodies. Also in 2008, a draft of the first twelve chapters of Midnight Sun, the Twilight story told by Edward, leaked online, and she put the project on hold. The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, about a newborn vampire, came out in 2010. For Twilight's tenth anniversary in 2015 she released Life and Death, a version with the characters' genders swapped. The Chemist, a thriller about a former agent on the run, followed in 2016. Midnight Sun finally arrived on August 4, 2020.

The Twilight films, starring Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, came out between 2008 and 2012, with the last book split in two. In 2011 she co-founded the production company Fickle Fish Films with Meghan Hibbett. As a producer, she worked on both parts of Breaking Dawn, Austenland (2013), The Host (2013) and Down a Dark Hall (2018).