Renée Ahdieh

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.

Life 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, as well as The Arabian Nights, which is the inspiration for her novel The Wrath and the Dawn.

Ahdieh graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Currently, she resides in Charlotte, North Carolina with her husband, Victor, and their dog, Mushu.

Career 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. 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. 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.

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. Ahdieh's current agent is Barbara Poelle of the Irene Goodman Literature Agency. USA Today Bestseller 4 on the Summer 2015 Kids' Indie Next List! Amazon's Best Books of the Year for 2015 – Young Adult 2015 A New York Public Library Best Book for Teens 2015 A Seventeen Magazine Best Book A YALSA 2016 Best Fiction for Young Adults Pick Junior Library Guild Selection 2015 A Booklist Top Ten First Novel for Young Adults