“Anna North presents a far different perspective on the [Western] genre, one forged by women, Black and nonbinary people looking for the freedom, space and right to exist in a world that largely doesn’t want them . . . The vividness with which she writes this world is one that’s captivating and hard to put down.” ― USA Today

Anna North is the author of four novels: Bog Queen, Outlawed, America Pacifica, and The Life and Death of Sophie Stark. Bog Queen (2025) was an indie and USA Today bestseller and National Book Foundation Science + Literature Selected Title. Outlawed (2021) was an instant New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club, Belletrist, and Book of the Month Club pick. The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (2015) was a Lambda Literary Award winner and was shortlisted for the Prix Médicis Etranger in France. North’s fiction has been translated into at least seven languages.

In addition to her fiction writing, North is also a senior correspondent at Vox, covering American work and family life. Previously, she was a writer and editor at the New York Times, Salon, BuzzFeed and Jezebel. North grew up in Los Angeles, graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and now lives in Brooklyn.

Bog Queen

Bloomsbury Publishing |
Literary Fiction

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKERPUBLISHERS WEEKLY AND ESQUIRE

In the gorgeous new novel by the
 New York Times bestselling author of Outlawed, “a strangely well-preserved Iron Age body turns up in an English bog, and the American forensic anthropologist on the case is thrust into an absorbing, complex mystery” (People magazine).

When a body is found in a bog in northwest England, Agnes, an American forensic anthropologist, is called to investigate. But this body is not like any she’s ever seen. Though its bones prove it was buried more than two thousand years ago, it is almost completely preserved.

Soon Agnes is drawn into a mystery from the distant past, called to understand and avenge the death of an Iron Age woman more like her than she knows. Along the way, she must contend with peat-cutters who want to profit from the bog and activists who demand that the land be left undisturbed. Then there’s the moss itself: a complex repository of artifacts and remains, with its own dark stories to tell.

As Agnes faces the deep history of what she has unearthed, she’s also forced to question what she thought she knew about her talent, her self-reliance, and her place in the world. Flashing between the uncertainty of post-Brexit England and the druidic order of Celtic Europe at the dawn of the Roman era, Bog Queen brims with contemporary urgency and ancient wisdom as it connects across time two gifted, farsighted young women learning to harness their strange strengths in a landscape more mysterious and complex than either can imagine.

Outlawed

Bloomsbury Publishing |
Literary Fiction

A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK * INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK * INDIE NEXT SELECTION * LIBRARY READS SELECTION * AMAZON EDITORS’ CHOICE * WASHINGTON POST BEST OF THE YEAR

In the year of our Lord 1894, I became an outlaw.

The day of her wedding, 17 year old Ada’s life looks good; she loves her husband, and she loves working as an apprentice to her mother, a respected midwife. But after a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are routinely hanged as witches, her survival depends on leaving behind everything she knows.

She joins up with the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang, a band of outlaws led by a preacher-turned-robber known to all as the Kid. Charismatic, grandiose, and mercurial, the Kid is determined to create a safe haven for outcast women. But to make this dream a reality, the Gang hatches a treacherous plan that may get them all killed. And Ada must decide whether she’s willing to risk her life for the possibility of a new kind of future for them all.

Featuring an irresistibly no-nonsense, courageous, and determined heroine, Outlawed dusts off the myth of the old West and reignites the glimmering promise of the frontier with an entirely new set of feminist stakes. Anna North has crafted a pulse-racing, page-turning saga about the search for hope in the wake of death, and for truth in a climate of small-mindedness and fear.

The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

Penguin Publishing Group |
Literary Fiction

Winner of the 2016 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction

“I read The Life and Death of Sophie Stark with my heart in my mouth. Not only a dissection of genius and the havoc it can wreak, but also a thunderously good story.”—Emma Donoghue, New York Times bestselling author of Room

“This novel is perceptive, subtle, funny and lingers in unexpected ways. The analysis of a woman who puts her art above all else is equal parts inspiration and warning story. Anna North makes prose look easy.”—Lena Dunham

Who is Sophie Stark? A brilliant filmmaker, a lover, a wife, a friend, a traitor. A troubled misfit who becomes a star, at great cost to the people who love her and, ultimately, to herself. Gripping and provocative, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark is a story of the power of art to transform lives and to destroy them, and of an artist’s drive to create something greater than herself, even if it means sacrificing everything—and everyone—she loves.

America Pacifica

Reagan Arthur Books |
Literary Fiction

Hundreds of miles off the frozen coast of what was once California is America Pacifica, where those who fled the dawn of the new ice age have tried to recreate their former home …America Pacifica is an island hundreds of miles off the coast of California – the only warm place left in a world in the grip of a new ice age. Darcy Pern is seventeen; her mother has gone missing, and the novel details her quest to find out the truth about her disappearance – a quest which soon becomes an investigation of the disturbing origins of America Pacifica itself, and its sinister and reclusive leader, a man known only as Tyson. America Pacifica invites comparison with the work of Margaret Atwood and China Mieville, but also with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, for its post-apocalyptic scenario and the touching relationship between Darcy and her mother, and the Stieg Larsson trilogy for its implacable central character who is determined to uncover the truth.

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The power of storytelling in a warming world

Climate change has been part of my fiction from my first novel, America Pacifica, about a world suffering a new ice age, to my most recent, Bog Queen, about the fight to preserve an ancient ecosystem (and what that ecosystem, itself, preserves). In writing about our world and the emergency it faces, I’ve come to believe that storytelling can be a way to get past climate anxiety and overwhelm and to imagine collective solutions. In this talk, I examine the ways in which stories can both communicate the gravity of the crisis at hand and motivate communities to bring about a better future.

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Women on a quest

As a young reader, I loved stories of heroes embarking on voyages of discovery. But I quickly realized that a lot of those heroes, from Odysseus to Frodo, were male, while the women in the stories had to stay home, if they even existed at all. One of the biggest projects of my fiction has been to write women and nonbinary people into quest narratives, allowing them to be the heroes. In this talk, I chart my own quest to create the stories I wanted to see as a child, and examine why stories like these matter.

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What does it mean to be outlawed?

Across history, groups of people — Black Americans, women, poor people, people who embody all of these identities — have been effectively exiled from American democracy, even when they were technically allowed to vote. This talk looks at what it really means to be able to participate in democracy, and what a truly inclusive democracy might look like.

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From experience to essay

I’ve begun teaching an occasional class focused on personal-essay writing, a form that has always challenged me but that I’ve had to practice again and again as an an author and journalist. I could offer a version of this class as a talk or as a participatory workshop.

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Rewriting the American West

My novel Outlawed is a retelling of the story of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in which all of the outlaws are women and nonbinary people. In this talk, I talk about my research on the American West, the communities who have been left out of mainstream Westerns, and the growing movement to recenter Westerns around their experiences.

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Honors, Awards & Recognition

National Book Foundation Science + Literature Selected Title (Bog Queen, 2026)
USA Today bestseller (Bog Queen, 2025-26)
Indie bestseller (Bog Queen, 2025)
Libby Award finalist, Best Book Club Book (Bog Queen, 2026)
IndieNext pick (Bog Queen, 2025)
LibraryReads pick (Bog Queen, 2025)
Publishers Weekly, New Yorker, and Esquire best book of 2025
New York Times bestseller (Outlawed, 2021)
Reese’s Book Club pick (Outlawed, 2021)
Belletrist pick (Outlawed, 2021)
Book of the Month Club pick (Outlawed, 2021)
Lambda Literary Award, Bisexual Fiction (The Life and Death of Sophie Stark, 2016)
Prix Médicis Étranger shortlist (The Life and Death of Sophie Stark, 2016)

Media Kit

By clicking the link below you will be directed to a Google Docs Folder
where you can download author photos and cover images.

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