Leigh Bardugo on Fantasy, Fame, and Writing Beyond YA
When Leigh Bardugo was in college in the 1990s, a tarot card reader told her that she was going to try to live an ordinary life—and that it would destroy her. Although Bardugo says she doesn’t place much stock in prognostication, she admits this reading turned out to be correct. Or nearly.
“I look back on that, and I think, I did try to live an ordinary life,” she says, “and it did almost destroy me. I was lucky to get out.”
Since 2012, Bardugo has published over a dozen books that have sold, in total, more than 20 million copies globally. She’s a regular presence atop the New York Times bestsellers list. Her first series—the young adult Shadow and Bone trilogy—was made into a show for Netflix by Oscar-nominated writer Eric Heisserer in 2021.
We’re talking in the book-lined living room of the impeccable yet modest home Bardugo shares with her husband in Los Angeles. We sit on a couch that might’ve come from an Oscar Wilde estate sale: tufted, emerald green and velvet. It’s the kind of sofa I want to pet.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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The 49-year-old Bardugo, with her cascading blond waves and all-black outfit, calls to mind Stevie Nicks. Or, more accurately, a Gen X goth. Silver rings grace nearly every finger, and silver chains drape from her wrist. On the wall behind us hangs a tapestry of a skeleton riding a horse, its saddle a wildcat’s pelt. A taxidermied rabbit—with wings—eyes me from a bookshelf.
“That’s Bertram Bunny,” she explains. “Brought to us from France.”
Not many authors can boast of a career as successful or as unexpected as Bardugo’s. Before she became a bestselling novelist, she supported herself with a string of less-than-satisfying jobs, from reviewing unedited footage for The Bachelor to doing on-set makeup for car commercials.
Blockbuster YA book series have been a regular occurrence since bookstores held midnight release parties for the latest Harry Potter. Bardugo’s novels, like anything megapopular with young people, have an intense fan base. Her readers write fanfic and make art and jewelry inspired by her characters. They buy Bardugo merch from Etsy and post about her work on Reddit and TikTok. These same readers crowd libraries, fan cons, and the local Barnes & Noble to catch a glimpse of their favorite author in her black lipstick. They attend these events dressed like her characters or like Bardugo herself: in all black, perhaps in a frock coat or corset. A few have her words tattooed on their bodies.
Bardugo could’ve done well churning out Shadow and Bone spin-offs. Instead, five years ago, she began publishing for adults, answering her creative instincts and embarking on a quest to attain the kind of acclaim rarely given to genre authors. Writers like Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Octavia E. Butler also struggled for acceptance by the literary establishment, yet they wrote for adults; Bardugo published fantasy YA, a genre viewed by unimaginative critics as even less respectable than horror or science fiction. There was also the question of her millions of readers. Would they follow her into the fiction aisle, or was she destined to remain in the YA section?
When I arrive at Bardugo’s home, she welcomes me with an unexpected hug. She apologizes for breaching the journalist-subject boundary, and we share a laugh about being fellow writers. I, too, am a novelist from Los Angeles; although I’m far from a household name, we both understand the challenges—and exhilarations—of this work.
Before Bardugo and I sink into that gorgeous green couch, she leads me past a mirror framed by a border of black snakes, and we pause beneath an ornate chandelier that, I will later learn, is made out of hollowed-out emu eggs. Her house’s gothic touches, the drama of it all, are exquisite. The decor is the physical embodiment of Bardugo’s writing.
Although Bardugo is disarming and funny, her warmth is tempered with guardedness. When I ask about her husband, she is quick to request that I withhold his name from my piece. I’m also not to divulge any clues about where she lives. This is her sanctuary—and also a fortress. With due respect to that tarot reader, Bardugo did indeed manage to escape an ordinary life.
Until she was 11, Bardugo lived in Sherman Oaks with her single mother and grandparents. When she was young, she attended the Mirman School, which requires an IQ of 138 or above to enroll. Bardugo describes it as a “tiny weird school full of geniuses” where everyone else was a math whiz; she got by as a decent poet. A childhood friend, Gamynne Guillotte, chuckled when I shared this assessment. “She was very, very good,” she told me. “Her humility may have come with time.”
According to Bardugo, she didn’t consider herself especially smart back then, but she knew who she was. It was when her mother remarried and they moved to Hancock Park that things changed.
At Marlborough, the all-girls junior high and high school she attended, intelligence wasn’t a social asset: “Everybody was supposed to have sun-kissed waves and perfect bones and not look like they were trying.” What she cared about—books, theater, the Cure—wasn’t what anyone else cared about. “My whole understanding of myself was really smashed to bits.”
Then one day, she walked into her school library. There, at the front, was a table of books with a sign that read “Discover New Worlds.” She picked up Frank Herbert’s Dune, and it swept her away. “I loved, and still love, genre,” she says. “I love science fiction and fantasy, just very deeply.”
Bardugo’s best-known work is set in the Grishaverse, a world laid out in 10 YA books partially informed by 19th-century czarist Russia. The Grisha practice the “Small Science”—controlling wind or fire, altering someone’s physical features. Shadow and Bone’s hero is Alina, an orphan who possesses the gift of summoning light. Will her power save her country, Ravka, from a sea of darkness called the Shadow Fold?
If the question doesn’t interest you, I get it. I also don’t typically like what’s called second-world fantasy: that is, stories set in a fictional realm separate from our own. I dread world-building—the author detailing everything from breakfast gruel to traffic patterns, lineages and taxonomies piling up like so much homework, what science fiction author M. John Harrison has deemed “the clomping foot of nerdism.”
But the Grishaverse isn’t what I feared. Bardugo’s fictional universe is sumptuous and immersive, with nary a cataloging of facts in sight. If her characters occasionally lock eyes as they save the world, so be it.
As Shadow and Bone showrunner Heisserer told me in an email, “there is a real texture to the palace grounds in Ravka, or the canals and alleyways of Ketterdam, or anywhere in between.”
And while the Grishaverse does contain some “very special teens,” I forgave Bardugo this trope because the pages turned faster than anything I’d read in a while. It reminded me of Tolkien, with killer twists and witty banter.
Bardugo’s embrace of tropes also creates space for meaning. Alina’s magic can be read as a metaphor for bodily autonomy. Through her power, Alina locates agency; her body, finally, becomes her own, allowing her to wield it as a weapon, to experience desire. This is an essential revelation for teen readers: that their bodies belong to them.
As Bardugo pets her schnauzer mix, Freddy, she tells me that all her books are survivor tales. “They’re stories about how to survive a world that doesn’t necessarily value you.”
As Bardugo was staring down her 35th birthday, she was working as a freelance makeup and special effects artist, a gig she didn’t hate, but wasn’t especially good at. She was also in an unhealthy relationship. She’d tried writing books for years but had failed every time. She was deeply depressed.
A phone call with a friend turned it around. During that conversation, Bardugo committed to finishing a novel. She didn’t have to revise the manuscript, let alone publish it; she only had to get to the end of a draft before her birthday. This goal was a promise to herself. When she hung up the phone, she did what she’d never done before: She wrote an outline, giving her book three clearly defined acts.
On Bardugo’s Instagram, there’s a photo of her from four months before her birthday deadline. In the picture, she clutches her laptop like a security blanket—or a life raft.
“Writing that book reminded me that I was good at something,” she says, her voice breaking. “I had been in this relationship with somebody who was trying to convince me 24-7 that I wasn’t worthwhile. I had really started to believe it.”
Finishing that first draft gave her the confidence to continue. With guidance from two friends, she revised the manuscript and sent it to agent Joanna Volpe, now the CEO of New Leaf Literary & Media. Bardugo’s was an unsolicited submission, yet another novel from an aspiring writer. She tells me she piqued Volpe’s interest by referencing an interview where Volpe had said she loved The Lord of the Rings. Once Volpe began Bardugo’s book, she couldn’t stop: She stayed at the office into the wee hours of the night to finish it.
Volpe sold the book to Macmillan Publishers, helping Bardugo beat her birthday deadline.
In 2012, at age 37, having worked a handful of different jobs, Bardugo became a published author. With a contract to ultimately deliver a trilogy, she gained enough resources—and confidence—to leave her toxic relationship. She would quit her attempt at living an ordinary life. It was her moment to start over.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” she says, “that I wrote a story about a young woman who is fundamentally underemployed and who has this gift and who needs to have this gift recognized in order to move forward.”
Shadow and Bone, the book for which the trilogy is named, received good, if not great, reviews. A year later, Bardugo published a follow-up novel, Siege and Storm. A year after that, the trilogy concluded with Ruin and Rising. While Shadow and Bone and Ruin and Rising debuted in the top 10 of the New York Times bestsellers list, they were not runaway hits, appearing on the list for a week or two before the world moved on.
It wasn’t until Bardugo published 2015’s Six of Crows, a heist story set in the Grishaverse, that her career took off. The book was on and off the New York Times bestsellers list for more than a year. It was a career-altering, life-changing hit.
With each book in the Grishaverse, Bardugo’s language evolved, becoming more precise. The first book’s clichés (“A shot rang out”; “I woke with a start”) were replaced with more distinct prose. (On the first page of Six of Crows, she writes, “The full moon looked less like a jewel than a yellowy blister in need of lancing.”) Bardugo credits this to working with editor Noa Wheeler on her first five books and to writing short stories where her focus shifted from the plot to the sentence.
As Bardugo’s prose gained complexity, she felt prepared to tackle an idea she’d held on to for years. On one of her first calls with Volpe, the agent had asked about other potential projects. Bardugo described a premise for a tale set at Yale, where she had graduated in 1997. The world of the university’s secret societies had long intrigued her.
Yet, though she was now ready to take on her alma mater’s real and imagined secret organizations, Bardugo was under contract to write Grishaverse titles. She’d already sold three million books in English. It would have been easy—frankly, it would’ve been advisable—to keep writing the same sorts of YA books for decades. They were familiar. They were popular. They made money.
Her readers wanted more of the same, not a magic-infused indictment of the Ivy League’s grip on American power. Bardugo found herself in a position few writers are lucky—and unlucky—enough to experience: She was caught between obsessive fans who hung on her every word and her own ambition to write more complex stories.
One of the readers who loved Six of Crows was an editor named Noah Eaker, who made it clear to Volpe that he wanted to work with Bardugo on whatever she wrote next. He meant it: He bought Ninth House on an 11-page proposal. Bardugo, who was still writing Grishaverse books, says she never would have made time to write Ninth House without a contract and a deadline. She worked on the novel concurrently with her next YA title. In 2019, she published both books.
Unlike the Grishaverse, Ninth House contains a straightforward, autobiographical core. Alex, the hero, from an unglamorous pocket of Los Angeles and raised by a single mother in an apartment, arrives at Yale out of her depth. She is traumatized by, among other things, her ability to see ghosts. Bardugo says that when she landed at the university as a freshman, it felt like everyone spoke a language she didn’t know. For the first time, she was exposed to East Coast wealth, at once frightening and intoxicating. Like the second worlds created by the fantasy writers she loved, here was a universe governed by rules both explicit and implied; here were strange beings that, if impossible to fully understand, could at least be classified and named.
This is where that urge to fit in, to live an “ordinary life,” began for Bardugo. In her teenage years in L.A., she had practiced being an outcast, watching films like David Lynch’s Eraserhead and procuring a fake ID to dance at Bar Sinister, a goth club in Hollywood. But at Yale, she marshaled her intelligence for the task of conforming. “My mom called my time in college my preppy-drag years,” Bardugo says with a laugh. She acquired the infamous Friends-era haircut the Rachel and donned sweaters from J.Crew. “I dated a lot of jocks. It was like collecting action figures.” These outsider feelings of her youth seethe at the edges of her adult fiction.
Ninth House and its sequel Hell Bent are darker than Bardugo’s YA books. Alex’s gift is more like a curse, in part because while she was growing up, it wasn’t believed, and it leads to a life of violence and loss. The novels also don’t wince at the unsavory aspects of Yale’s past or present, its reliance on the dispossession of the many in service of a few. The magic that ignites the Grishaverse reappears in these adult books, but it’s now just another form of power like money, education, or charisma. It offers opportunity to anyone privileged enough, or lucky enough, to seize it.
If taken too far, the magic here can also harm, deform, and obliterate. Bardugo explores a similar danger in the Grishaverse, but when it happens in a recognizable setting, an American city, with a girl not so far from a younger version of myself, the trauma feels scarier.
It was, indeed, too intense for some expecting further adventures of very special teens. After advanced copies of Ninth House were distributed at the Young Adult Literature Convention in June 2019, some readers balked at its content, going to Twitter to advocate for trigger warnings. A few wanted these warnings to be printed on the cover. While this campaign wasn’t successful, it left Bardugo feeling protective of her authorial vision.
“I want you to read something that shocks you or disconcerts you or makes you feel uncomfortable,” she says.
Despite the early outcry, Ninth House was an instant New York Times bestseller. It’s set to be adapted for television by Amazon Studios.
Leigh Bardugo has published more than a dozen titles across multiple genres, which have sold more than 20 million copies globally and attracted a very large, and very loyal, fan base.
Once you’ve written a pitch-black campus novel, the next move, naturally, if you’re a commercially minded novelist, is to write historical adult fiction about the Spanish Inquisition. What’s the point of discovering your powers if not to use them once in a while?
Bardugo’s The Familiar centers on a Jewish scullery maid in 16th-century Madrid whose family converted to Catholicism in order to stay in Spain. Now orphaned, Luzia sleeps on her employers’ cellar floor and keeps hidden her gift of small magic: the bread she can unburn, the fabric she can unrip.
Of course, Luzia’s powers are discovered, and of course, she can do more than fix the bread. Eventually, she finds herself conscripted by a powerful man, and she begins training to perform for the king. She is assigned a mysterious mentor. Of course, he is an immortal familiar.
I say “of course” because, in synopsis, The Familiar sounds like it could be yet another YA fantasy novel, packed with tropes and story beats that are, well, familiar. Bardugo admits she has “popcorn sensibilities,” girded by that three-act structure that works so well for her (and her readers).
And yet, like any good novel, The Familiar isn’t only its plot, which hums along efficiently, sleek as a machine. There is historical rigor here. Bardugo worked with Robin Kello, who at the time was a PhD candidate at UCLA; he helped her find the details she needed to build her story. “You never know what’s going to grab you,” Bardugo says of the research. “It’s the only way to absorb the material culture of the world—recipes, cosmetics, how clothing got cleaned and households got heated, how people mourned.”
The book explicitly poses wise questions, like “Who has more power in a house than the woman who stirs the soup and makes the bread and scrubs the floor, who fills the foot warmer with hot coals, and arranges your letters, and nurses your children?” This is a 21st-century question as much as it is a 16th-century one.
At first, Bardugo worried that her fans might not like The Familiar, that the book might be too quiet, the magic too muted. She worried more, however, about the literary establishment calling her a poser for trying to write historical fiction. No matter. The Familiar, like the Ninth House series, was a story she had to tell, derived from her own Sephardic Jewish ancestry. It was also, again, the story of an outsider with a complicated gift.
“I wanted to build a Trojan horse book for people who think they don’t like fantasy or say they would never read genre,” she says, her eyes twinkling with mischief. “Those were the people I wanted to invite in. Join our cult. First taste is free.”
It must’ve worked. The Familiar debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times bestsellers list, and the Times’ Book Review named the novel one of the 100 best books of 2024. Bardugo appeared on Good Morning America and was interviewed on Fresh Air. There was a major bidding war to option the novel, though the details of that adaptation remain undivulged.
Meanwhile, as Bardugo has achieved credibility as an author of adult fiction, Time magazine named Six of Crows one of the best YA novels ever. Her handprints were immortalized on the Walk of Fame outside Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, where you can purchase a Shadow and Bone T-shirt. And in 2023, Bardugo signed a staggering eight-figure deal with Macmillan for 12 novels across various imprints.
Currently, Bardugo is writing a novella in what she says will be a series of horror books about a sinister California town. “I love a bad-town story,” she tells me with a smirk.
After that, she’ll write the last novel in the Ninth House trilogy, and then she’ll continue work on a science fiction graphic novel and two picture books she’s under contract to complete.
And then? She wants to write a historical novel set in early-1900s Los Angeles, a book that she hopes will, like so many California novels, grapple with illusion, the promise of wealth and fame, and the consequences. She claims it will contain no magic.
“It will have a lot of murder in it,” she assures me.
When I ask if she considers herself a California writer, she flashes an enormous grin. All caution dissolves.
“I’d very much like to have that mantle.”
From her green couch, Bardugo’s gaze moves to a window overlooking her backyard. Out there is a garden she’s proud of having nurtured. This is the sanctuary she built with the success of her work, a place where she can write herself into whatever worlds call to her. Seeing a hummingbird flit past the window, she stops and points it out to me. “I think they’re a good omen,” she says tenderly.•
Edan Lepucki is the author of the novels California, Woman No 17, and Time’s Mouth.
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