Megan Whalen Turner

A Newbery Honor in 1997 for The Thief set Megan Whalen Turner on a story that took her twenty-four years to finish. Return of the Thief, published in 2020, is the sixth and final novel about Eugenides, the light-fingered narrator who begins in a king's prison cell and ends up steering the fortunes of Sounis, Eddis and Attolia, an invented peninsula that borrows the feel of ancient Greece without copying it. Turner was born at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1965 and took an English degree at Chicago. Moira's Pen followed in 2022, with drawings by Deena So'Oteh, gathering her short fiction from that world along with unpublished fragments, verse, notes on the museum objects that prompted particular scenes, and a recipe for almond cake. She is married to the cognitive scientist Mark Turner.