Meet the author

Molly Knox Ostertag.

Writer & illustrator · United States · b. 1991

Molly Knox Ostertag: American author-illustrator behind The Witch Boy trilogy and The Girl from the Sea — emotionally intelligent, gender-aware, magical-realist graphic novels for ages 9–13.

Molly Knox Ostertag is an American author-illustrator born in 1991, best known for The Witch Boy graphic-novel trilogy (The Witch Boy, The Hidden Witch, The Midwinter Witch) about Aster, a young boy in a magical family where boys are meant to be shape-shifters and girls are meant to be witches, who quietly knows where he belongs anyway. The books handle gender, identity and family expectations with serious emotional intelligence inside a warm magical-realist story. Ostertag also wrote The Girl from the Sea (queer YA selkie graphic novel) and works on the Lumberjanes comics. A core middle-grade graphic-novel author for ages 9–13, particularly important to LGBTQ-inclusive shelves.