Frances Hardinge

3 universes Last reviewed 2026-09-28

Frances Hardinge is a British author of fantasy fiction for children and young adults, born in 1973 in Brighton, East Sussex, England. She dreamed of becoming a writer from the age of four and studied English at Somerville College, Oxford, where she founded a writers' workshop. Her writing career began after she won a short-story magazine competition; she wrote her debut novel in her spare time and, encouraged by a friend, submitted it to Macmillan Publishers, which published Fly by Night in 2005. Her subsequent novels include Cuckoo Song (2014), The Lie Tree (2015), Deeplight (2019), and Unraveller (2022), all noted for their inventive, often unsettling imagery and morally complex young heroines. Hardinge won the Branford Boase Award in 2006 for Fly by Night and the Robert Holdstock Award in 2015 for Cuckoo Song. The Lie Tree won the 2015 Costa Book Award for Book of the Year, making it only the second children's book to take the overall prize since Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass in 2001. In 2018 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Known for her distinctive personal style, she is often seen wearing a black hat and favors old-fashioned dress, a sensibility that carries through into the Gothic, folkloric atmosphere of her fiction.

Universe(s)

Books

• Fly By Night (2005) · Fly By Night Core Canon
• Twilight Robbery (2011) · Fly By Night Core Canon
• Cuckoo Song (2014) · Cuckoo Song Core Canon
• The Lie Tree (2015) · The Lie Tree Core Canon

Aggregate across all universes

These are separate, unrelated universes; the totals below are plain sums of already-published per-universe facts, never a blended or averaged score across them. See each universe's own figures above.

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 4 books
• Award recognitions across all universes: 6 (4 won, 1 finalist mention, 1 nomination)

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