Here are 7 Author Shoutouts for this week, authors we love to recommend. Find your favorite author or discover an author whose work you’ve not yet read.
~Rebecca Yarros
~ Cicero
~ Mary Schmich
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This Week’s Author Shoutouts
Rebecca Yarros
An Author Shoutout to Rebecca Yarros, an American author of romance and fantasy-romance novels. She gained widespread global attention with her fantasy series, The Empyrean. The first book, Fourth Wing (2023), became a massive commercial hit. The series, which is planned for five books and is being adapted for television, focuses on a brutal military college where cadets ride dragons.
Before this fantasy pivot, Yarros was a prolific writer of over 20 contemporary romance novels, often drawing on her background as a military spouse—she is married to an Army aviator. Her early novels, such as the Flight & Glory series, frequently feature military settings and themes.
Her personal experiences inform her fiction, particularly her work in The Empyrean series. The physical limitations of her protagonist, Violet Sorrengail, were inspired by Yarros’s own experience living with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), a chronic illness that affects her and four of her six children. She and her husband are also the co-founders of the nonprofit One October, which supports children and families in the foster care system.
Taylor Jenkins Reid
An Author Shoutout to Taylor Jenkins Reid, an American author of contemporary fiction. Her novels focus on the public and private lives of famous, ambitious women. Reid’s consistent use of the oral history or interview transcript format in several of her works, lends documentary realism to her fictional narratives. Her breakout novel, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, chronicles the ambitious life of a reclusive Hollywood star. This was followed by Daisy Jones & The Six, which is presented entirely as a transcript detailing the explosive career and breakup of a fictional 1970s rock band. This novel was adapted into a limited series for Amazon Prime Video.
Before establishing her literary career, Reid worked in film casting, an experience she has credited with providing her insight into the creation of public personas and the Hollywood machine—themes that feature prominently in her work.
Her novels explore the price of fame and the complexities of identity, ambition, and love, often connecting characters across different books in a subtle shared universe. Additionally, outside of her well-known contemporary novels, Reid is also the author of a Star Wars novel, Ezra’s Gamble. She is a writer whose commercial success is closely tied to her distinctive narrative style and thematic focus on celebrity culture.
Emily Henry
An Author Shoutout to Emily Henry, an American author of adult contemporary romance. Her novels popularized the modern romantic comedy genre through their combination of witty dialogue, strong emotional depth, and focus on relatable characters. Her breakthrough adult title, Beach Read (2020), established her signature style with its enemies-to-lovers narrative. Subsequent novels including the friends-to-lovers story People We Meet on Vacation (2021) and the meta-romance Book Lovers (2022), have all been optioned for film and TV adaptations.
A native of the Midwest, Henry studied creative writing in college and often incorporates familiar, emotionally resonant settings like West Michigan and Ohio into her novels, viewing the setting as crucial to character development. Before her success in adult romance, Henry published Young Adult novels that occasionally included elements of magical realism. Her fast-drafting/slow-rewriting process allows her to maintain a prolific output.
Adam Haslett
An Author Shoutout to Adam Haslett, an American author whose emotionally raw and insightful fiction has earned him a place among the most celebrated writers of his generation. He is a literary force, having had two different books named finalists for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
His powerful debut, the short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here, and his acclaimed novel Imagine Me Gone, both delve into the complexities of mental illness and family love with profound compassion. This theme is deeply personal; his writing is informed by his own family’s history with mental illness.
Haslett’s academic path is as impressive as his literary career, having earned degrees from Swarthmore, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Yale Law School. Though he doesn’t practice law full-time, his legal background adds an incisive rigor to his exploration of social and political themes, as seen in his novel Union Atlantic.
A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Haslett is a “method” writer who uses meditation to fully inhabit his characters’ emotional states. Whether exploring the financial crisis, as he did in Union Atlantic, or the quiet pain of a family navigating tragedy, Haslett writes with a meticulous eye and a deep sense of humanity, offering readers stories that are as beautiful as they are heartbreaking.
Richard Swan
An Author Shoutout to Richard Swan, a British author who has brought a new twist to epic fantasy. Known for his rigorous world-building and narratives that fuse grimdark action with the sharp intellect of a legal thriller, Swan has quickly become a sensation.
His credible background as a qualified commercial litigator in London for ten years is the secret sauce behind his most famous work, The Empire of the Wolf Trilogy. The series, which begins with The Justice of Kings, follows Sir Konrad Vonvalt, a feared “Emperor’s Justice” who travels the realm as a combination investigator, judge, and executioner. Swan’s legal expertise lends astonishing authenticity to the series’ complex jurisprudence and political intrigue.
Now living in Sydney, Australia, this former Royal Air Force base resident continues to write at a prolific rate. While his early work includes self-published military space operas, his current focus remains on high-concept fantasy. He is even set to launch a new trilogy, The Great Silence, a dark flintlock horror fantasy. Drawing inspiration from everything from medieval Europe to hard sci-fi, Richard Swan offers readers a powerful and intellectually engaging experience, proving that a fantasy world’s legal system can be just as fascinating as its dragons!
Ali Smith
An Author Shoutout to Ali Smith, an innovative contemporary Scottish writer, who consistently challenges literary conventions with her inventive use of language, time, and form. She holds a rare distinction in British letters, having been shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize for Fiction four times.
Smith is renowned for her ambitious Seasonal Quartet—four novels (Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer) written and published in real-time between 2016 and 2020. This cycle engaged directly with contemporary political events, such as Brexit, and culminated in Summer winning the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.
Her highly experimental novel How to Be Both also earned significant acclaim, winning multiple major awards, including the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Smith’s education included a pursuit of a Ph.D. in modernism, and she previously worked as a literature lecturer before dedicating herself fully to writing due to illness.
Her characteristic style blends reality and surreality, using collage and dialogue to present multiple perspectives. Her novels are known for being witty, playful, and unapologetically political, seamlessly weaving social commentary with philosophical depth. Appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), Ali Smith remains a leading and highly influential figure in contemporary literature.
Mona Awad
An Author Shoutout to Mona Awad, a Canadian novelist and short story writer of darkly comic fiction. Her writing is known for its blend of literary fiction with elements of horror and the grotesque, offering sharp satire of themes concerning female experience, body image, and the toxicity of specific social environments like academia and the beauty industry.
Awad’s debut novel, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (2016), won the Amazon Best First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the prestigious Giller Prize. Her breakout cult novel, Bunny (2019), achieved significant recognition, being named a Best Book of the Year by Time and Vogue. The novel, which satirizes a highly selective MFA program, is currently under option for film adaptation, as is her 2023 gothic horror novel, Rouge.
With a rigorous academic background that includes a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and a masters dissertation on fear in the fairy tale, Awad’s intellectual depth is evident in her sophisticated prose. She previously worked as a bookseller and freelance journalist before becoming a full-time author and professor. Her distinct voice and commitment to exploring the darker aspects of modern life have cemented her position as an important and original figure in contemporary fiction.
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