ABOUT
V. E .Schwab was born in California, raised in Tennessee, and currently splits her time between Denver, Colorado and Edinburgh, Scotland. She got her undergraduate degree in book design at Washington University in St. Louis, and her masters in depictions of monstrosity in medieval art at the University of Edinburgh. In addition to writing books and hosting a podcast called No Write Way, she spends her time on tour, or plagued by the knowledge of how short life is, in terms of the number of books she’ll be able to read, and obsessively saving tiktok videos for recipes she’ll probably never make. She also likes to run, and cycle, and swim—though not all at once.
V.E. is the author of more than 25 books, spanning MG, YA, and Adult, though she’s never been keen on labeling stories for a certain audience. Plenty of young readers like Vicious, and plenty of older ones like Cassidy Blake, and she believes the best story is the one that finds you when you need it.
Her greatest goal as an author is to make you doubt your reality. Not by convincing you that magic is real, but by planting a seed of doubt that it’s not.
FAQs
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I’ve always loved telling stories—poems, short fiction, scripts—but I didn’t think I’d ever write novels. I didn’t think I could hold something so large in my head. But when I was a college sophomore, I realized I was afraid to try, because I was afraid to fail. So I sat down and wrote my first novel, and it was terrible (as all first attempts should be), but it taught me a valuable lesson: I COULD. I’ve never stopped.
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I try to write for at least two hours in the morning. That might not sound like much, but there’s a difference between writing time and typing time. I think about the scenes I’m working on for hours/days/weeks, so when I sit down for those two hours, I’m typing the entire time. I don’t let myself write more than three hours at a time, because I prefer to have momentum the next day. My afternoons are usually taken up with business (there’s a ton of work and admin that goes into being an author outside of actual storytelling) and my evenings are for me.
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The knowledge that my dreams are big and life is short. I know that might sound flippant, but it’s the truth—there are so many stories I want to tell. I don’t feel like I have time to waste. Of course, that doesn’t mean I don’t get stuck, or feel daunted by the task. But my want is always louder than my fear.
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I identify with all of them, in some way. The good, the bad, the stubborn. I tend to break off a small piece of my personality and then grow someone very different. But there are a few characters that have felt the most me: Kate Harker, Victor Vale, Lila Bard, Henry Strauss.
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I like to think of books like puzzles—they have a lower age advisory, but no upper age limit. I’m not one to tell a young reader they aren’t ready for something, if they believe they are, and I don’t think we ever age out of reading something—we come back to it with different eyes, new perspectives. Young readers, like older ones, have the incredible ability to decide for themselves, and put a book down if it isn’t right for them right now.
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My cats, Thomas and Chauncey, who make frequent appearances in my Instagram Stories, live with me in Edinburgh, along with my dog, Riley, who is honestly less canine and more eldritch horror.