| Renée Ahdieh | |
| Nationality: | American |
| Occupation: | Writer |
| Alma Mater: | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| Period: | 2010s–present |
| Genre: | Young adult fantasy |
Renée Ahdieh is an American-Korean author, best known for her New York Times best-selling series The Wrath & the Dawn. Her books have been translated into many languages.
Renée Ahdieh spent her first years of childhood growing up in her mother's homeland of Seoul, South Korea. As a young child, she enjoyed reading and grew fond of fantasy, romance, and history. As a result of her heritage, Ahdieh looked for novels that supported diversity at an early age. She enjoyed and later drew inspiration from a variety of authors, such as Paulo Coelho, Isabel Allende, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rabindranath Tagore, Diana Gabaldon, Naguib Mahfouz, Anne Rice, Salman Rushdie, and Libba Bray.[1]
Ahdieh graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.[2] Currently, she resides in Charlotte, North Carolina with her husband, Victor, and their dog, Mushu.
On May 12, 2015, G. P. Putnam's Sons released Ahdieh's first novel, The Wrath & the Dawn. Ahdieh envisioned a re-imagining of One Thousand and One Nights, which is a famous collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian folktales. She also drew inspiration from her husband's Persian family heritage.[3] The sequel, The Rose & the Dagger, was published on April 26, 2016. Though she first planned this series as a trilogy, her publisher encouraged her to focus on just two novels to avoid series fatigue.[4] In addition to the two novels, Ahdieh released three short stories in this same world within a few months of each other in 2016.
Imagine Entertainment optioned the film rights to The Wrath & the Dawn in 2017.[5]
On May 16, 2017, Ahdieh released Flame in the Mist, the first book in a new series with nods to the East Asian stories she loved as a child. She found inspiration for the novel in strong female characters, such as Hermione Granger and Mulan, and stated that since she felt out-of-place at times as a mixed-race child, she often writes novels that expand on different perspectives and hopes to create characters that show varying levels of strength. Flame in the Mist features a heroine who disguises herself as a man to defeat a dark clan that attempted to slaughter her just before an arranged marriage. A sequel titled Smoke in the Sun was released June 5, 2018.
The Beautiful, the beginning of a new series set in 1872 New Orleans, was published on October 8, 2019.
In November 2019, a web comic version of The Wrath & the Dawn began publishing as a Webtoon Originals comic, with Ahdieh collaborating with artist SilvesterVitale.[6] Ahdieh's current agent is Barbara Poelle of the Irene Goodman Literature Agency.