A. S. King

Ten years in Ireland shaped A. S. King's writing life: two in Dublin, then a renovated farm in County Tipperary, where she taught adult literacy and wrote novel after novel without selling any of them. She returned to Pennsylvania in 2004, and Please Ignore Vera Dietz arrived in 2010. Its narration passes between Vera, a teenager delivering for Pagoda Pizza, her father Ken, her dead friend Charlie Kahn, and the town pagoda itself. The book was named a Michael L. Printz Honor Book and nominated for an Edgar. King has since taken the Printz outright twice, for Dig and for The Collectors, the only writer to manage that, and received the 2022 Margaret Edwards Award. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1970, she trained as a photographer before turning to novels.