Kiran Ann Millwood HargraveFRSL (born 29 March 1990) is a British poet, playwright and novelist. In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.[1]
Early life
Hargrave was born on 29 March 1990 in Surrey.[2] She is of Indian descent on her mother's side.[3][4] Hargrave graduated with a degree in English a Drama from Homerton College, Cambridge in 2011.[5] She later completed an MSt in Creative Writing at Oxford University in 2014.[6]
Career
She started writing for publication in 2009. In 2014, her debut novel The Girl Of Ink and Stars, aka The Cartographer's Daughter, was bought as part of a six-figure, two-book deal by KnopfRandom House (US), and Chicken House Scholastic (rest-of-world). It was published in May 2016 in the UK, where it won the overall Waterstones Children's Book Prize 2017 and the British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year.[7][8] The US release was in November 2016. It has sold to more than 25 territories around the world and is a perennial bestseller in the UK.
Hargrave's poetry has appeared internationally in journals such as Magma, Room, Agenda, Shearsman, The Irish Literary Review and Orbis. In 2013, Neil Astley judged her poem "Grace" as winner of the Yeovil Literary Prize. This poem appeared in her third collection, Splitfish (Gatehouse Press, 2013). Her first piece as a playwright, about human trafficking, was entitled BOAT, and first dramatized in October 2015 by PIGDOG theatre company at Theatre N16 in Balham.[9] It opened to five-star reviews, with CultureFly calling it "the most compelling and urgent piece of theatre you will see this year."
Her second children's novel of The Island at the End of Everything (2017) which is set in the early 1900s in the Culion leper colony in the Philippines was shortlisted for the 2017 Costa Book Awards.[10][11] Her third children's novel, The Way Past Winter, was published in late 2018, followed in 2019 by her debut YA novel, The Deathless Girls.[12][13][14] Her first adult novel, The Mercies, was published by Picador in 2020, and became an instant bestseller.[15]Julia and the Shark (2021) in collaboration with her husband, Tom de Freston, was shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year and the Wainwright Prize for Children's Writing on Nature and Conservation.[16]
Personal life
Hargrave currently lives in Oxford with her husband, the visual artist Tom de Freston.[17] They have a daughter, born 2023. Hargrave had previously struggled with hyperfertility and a series of miscarriages.[18] She is bisexual.[19]
Works
Adult novels
The Mercies (Picador, 2020)
The Dance Tree (Picador, 2022)
Young adult novels
The Deathless Girls (Orion, 2019)
Children's books
The Girl of Ink and Stars (Chicken House, 2016)
The Island at the End of Everything (Chicken House, 2017)
