Leigh Bardugo is an American fantasy author, born in Jerusalem in 1975 and raised in Los Angeles. She is best known for the Grishaverse novels, which began with “Shadow and Bone” in 2012, and for the Alex Stern books for adults, which opened with “Ninth House” in 2019 and concluded with “Dead Beat” in 2026.
Bardugo was brought up by her grandparents and studied English at Yale University, graduating in 1997. Before her first novel was published she worked in copywriting and journalism, and in makeup and special effects.
“Shadow and Bone” follows Alina Starkov, a teenage orphan in the Russia-inspired land of Ravka who discovers a power she never knew she had. The novel reached number eight on the New York Times bestseller list, and “Siege and Storm” and “Ruin and Rising” completed the trilogy. “Six of Crows” and “Crooked Kingdom” moved the setting to the city of Ketterdam, where the criminal Kaz Brekker leads a crew of thieves in a plot to break into a high-security prison. “King of Scars” and “Rule of Wolves” then returned to Ravka, told from the viewpoints of Nikolai Lantsov, Zoya Nazyalensky and Nina Zenik. Netflix adapted the books as the series “Shadow and Bone”, which ran for two seasons between 2021 and 2023.
“Ninth House” was her first novel for adults. Its heroine, Alex Stern, is a high school dropout who can see ghosts and is offered a place at Yale to monitor the occult rituals of its secret societies. The book won the 2019 Goodreads Choice Award for fantasy, and “Hell Bent” followed in 2023. Amazon Studios announced a television adaptation in 2019, with Bardugo as an executive producer.
Her other fiction includes “Wonder Woman: Warbringer” (2017), written for the DC Icons series, and “The Familiar” (2024), a standalone historical fantasy set in Spain during the Spanish Golden Age. “The Invisible Parade” (2025), illustrated by John Picacio, was followed in 2026 by the picture book “Better Pets”, with illustrations by Liz Climo, and by “Six of Crows: A Darker Shore”, an illustrated Grishaverse story told through letters and documents and set after “Crooked Kingdom”. Bardugo received an Inkpot Award in 2019 and lives in Los Angeles.
Publication Order of Shadow and Bone Trilogy Books
