Meet the author

Beth O'Brien.

Writer · United Kingdom

Beth O'Brien: Carnegie Medal-winning debut author of Wolf Siren, whose lyrical, disability-centred fairy-tale fantasy reimagines who gets to be the hero.

Beth O'Brien is an English children's author whose atmospheric, fairy-tale-rooted fantasy centres disabled heroines with real authority. Born visually impaired and with an upper-limb difference, and completing a doctorate on the representation of disability in fairy-tale retellings, she brings hard-won lived experience to the page. Her debut, Wolf Siren, is a fierce, lyrical feminist reimagining of Red Riding Hood in which a partially sighted girl finds belonging in the very forest her village taught her to fear. Her second novel, Feather Vane, is a warm, twisty quest steeped in Welsh myth. Thoughtful, immersive and quietly radical, her books are for readers ready to look past the edge of the map and question who gets to decide what is monstrous.