T. Kingfisher

Ursula Vernon writes and draws for children. T. Kingfisher is what she calls herself when the audience is older. Under her own name there are the Hamster Princess and Dragonbreath books and the graphic novel Digger, which won a Hugo; the Kingfisher byline covers everything else, and the split is about audience rather than tone, since the jokes and the talking animals cross over freely.

What she is unusually good at is the domestic register of fantasy. Her heroines have jobs, bad knees and a practical streak, and they keep noticing chores while the plot tries to be epic. A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking hands its teenage magician power over bread dough, which sounds like a gag until the siege starts. Nettle & Bone opens with a woman assembling a dog out of bones in a charnel pit and treats it as work: unpleasant, slow, necessary. That flat, competent voice is why the horror lands too. The Twisted Ones and The Hollow Places both put an ordinary person with a normal amount of sarcasm in front of something that should not exist, and the sarcasm does not survive contact.

The major awards followed the move to older readers. Nettle & Bone took the Hugo for best novel and the novella Thornhedge took one of its own, alongside a Nebula for the short story Jackalope Wives and Mythopoeic Awards on both sides of her split career.