Courtney Summers

Courtney Summers writes young adult fiction with the working parts of a crime novel. Born in 1986 in Belleville, Ontario, she won the Cybils Award for her first book, Cracked Up to Be (2008), and a decade later Sadie collected the Edgar Award for best young adult novel, the Odyssey Award and an Audie by alternating a runaway girl's voice with transcripts of the podcast chasing her. The Project, from Wednesday Books in February 2021, follows the aspiring journalist Lo Denham as she tries to reach her sister Bea inside the Unity Project, a charitable movement led by the magnetic Lev Warren. I'm the Girl, from 2022, puts a sixteen-year-old at the gates of an exclusive resort beside the body of a girl her own age, and is as angry about who gets believed as Sadie was. Summers writes from Ontario and has said she is not interested in giving teenage readers a softened version of what she thinks is true.