Kiran Millwood Hargrave


Kiran Millwood Hargrave is a British poet, playwright and novelist. Hargrave started writing for publication in 2009. In 2014, her debut novel The Girl Of Ink and Stars aka The Cartographer's Daughter was bought as part of a six-figure, two-book deal by Knopf Random House, and Chicken House Scholastic. It was published in May 2016 in the UK, where it won the overall Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2017 and the British Book Award’s Children’s Book of the Year. The US release was in November 2016. It has sold to over a dozen territories around the world.
Hargrave's poetry has appeared internationally in journals such as Magma, Room, Agenda, Shearsman, The Irish Literary Review and Orbis. In 2013, Neil Astley judged her poem 'Grace' winner of the Yeovil Literary Prize. This poem appears in her third collection, Splitfish. Her first piece as a playwright, about human trafficking, was entitled "BOAT", and first dramatized in October 2015 by PIGDOG theatre company at Theatre N16 in Balham. It opened to five-star reviews, with CultureFly calling it 'the most compelling and urgent piece of theatre you will see this year.' Her children's novel of a fragile paradise, The Island at the End of Everything was shortlisted for the 2017 Costa Book Awards. Her third children's novel, The Way Past Winter, was published in late 2018. Her first adult novel, The Mercies was published by Picador in 2020.

Personal life

Hargrave graduated from Cambridge University in 2011, Oxford University in 2014, and currently lives in Oxford with her husband, the visual artist Tom de Freston.