Patricia Anne McKillip was born in Salem, Oregon (USA) on February 29, 1948 – a leap year baby! She started writing at 14, and according to the notes in the Riddlemaster trilogy, “she has been writing ever since – except for a brief detour when she thought she would be a concert pianist.” The House on Parchment Street has a neat quote about how she started writing – “In a fit of boredom one day when she was fourteen, she sat down in front of a window overlooking a stately medieval church and its graveyard and produced a thirty-page fairy tale.”

She went to the College of Notre Dame, Belmont, and San Jose University where she earned a BA in English. She then went on for a MA at the San Jose State University. McKillip then moved to San Francisco, then to the Catskill Mountains in NY, then Roxbury, NY and now lives in Oregon.

She won the World Fantasy Award in 1975 for The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, the Locus Award in 1980 for Harpist in the Wind, and the Balrog award in 1985 in the short fiction category for “A Troll and Two Roses”.

She is, very fittingly, married to a poet – David Lunde.