Renee Ahdieh


Renée Ahdieh is an American-Korean author, best known for her New York Times best-selling series The Wrath and the Dawn. Her books have been translated into many languages. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Currently, she resides in Charlotte, North Carolina with her husband, Victor, and their dog, Mushu. Renée Ahdieh is now creating a web novel version of “The Wrath and the Dawn” with SilvesterVitale on the platform Webtoon.

Early life

Renée Ahdieh spent her first years of childhood growing up in her mother's homeland of Seoul, South Korea. As a young child, she enjoyed reading and grew fond of fantasy, romance, and history. As a result of her heritage, Ahdieh looked for novels that supported diversity, even at an early age. She enjoyed and later drew inspiration from a variety of authors, such as Paulo Coelho, Isabel Allende, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rabindranath Tagore, Diana Gabaldon, Naguib Mahfouz, Anne Rice, Salman Rushdie, and Libba Bray.

Career

On May 12, 2015, G. P. Putnam's Sons released Ahdieh's novel, The Wrath and the Dawn. She envisioned a re-imagining of One Thousand and One Nights, which is a famous collection of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and East Asian folktales. She also drew inspiration from her husband's Persian family heritage. The sequel, The Rose and the Dagger, was published on April 26, 2016. Though she first planned this series as a trilogy, her publisher encouraged her to focus on just two novels to avoid series fatigue. In addition to the two novels, Ahdieh also released three short stories in this re-imagined world within a few months of each other in 2016.
Imagine Entertainment optioned the film rights to The Wrath and the Dawn in 2016.
On May 16, 2017, Ahdieh released Flame in the Mist, the first book in her new series with nods to the East Asian stories she loved as a child. For this novel, she found inspiration in strong female characters, such as Hermione Granger and Mulan. Since she felt out-of-place at times as a mixed-race child, she often writes novels that expand on different perspectives and hopes to create characters that show varying levels of strength. This novel features a strong heroine who disguises herself as a man to defeat a dark clan that attempted to slaughter her just before an arranged marriage. A sequel titled Smoke in the Sun was released June 5, 2018.
The Beautiful, the beginning of a new series set in 1872 New Orleans, was published on October 8, 2019.
Her current agent is Barbara Poelle of the Irene Goodman Literature Agency.

Publications

;The Wrath and the Dawn
  1. The Wrath & the Dawn: May 12, 2015
  2. The Rose & the Dagger: April 26, 2016
;The Wrath and the Dawn Short story
  1. Crown and the Arrow: March 1, 2016
  2. Moth and the Flame: March 22, 2016
  3. Mirror and the Maze: April 26, 2016
;The Flame in the Mist
  1. Flame in the Mist: May 16, 2017
  2. Smoke in the Sun: June 5, 2018
;The Flame in the Mist Short Story
  1. Ókami: 2018
  2. Yumi: 2018
;The Beautiful
  1. The Beautiful: October 8, 2019
  2. The Damned: 2020

    Awards