Alexene Farol Follmuth

Two names, one writer. Alexene Farol Follmuth keeps her legal name for young adult books and signs adult fantasy as Olivie Blake, which is why The Atlas Six and The Atlas Paradox carry the second one. Born in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1989, of half Filipino descent, she has a master's in urban planning and put in time at a public defender's office while studying law, then dropped law for writing. The Blake name came off a name generator when she was posting fan fiction anonymously. She self-published The Atlas Six in 2020, readers on TikTok carried it, Tor reissued it in 2022, and it reached number three on the American bestseller lists; The Atlas Paradox arrived later that year and The Atlas Complex in 2024. My Mechanical Romance, from Holiday House in 2022, is the softer end of her work, a school romance between Bel, pushed into the robotics team against her wishes, and its captain Mateo Luna, written around what girls of colour run into in engineering. She lives in Los Angeles.