Shannon Hale: Mormon Author
Shannon Hale is a New York Times best-selling and award-winning author of young-adult fantasy and adult fiction.
Born Shannon Bryner in Salt Lake City, Utah, she earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Utah, and a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Montana. Before she published her first book, she pursued acting in television, stage, and improvisational comedy.
Her first book, The Goose Girl, was published in 2003, and was followed by Enna Burning, River Secrets, and Forest Born, all part of her award-winning Books of Bayern series. Princess Academy was a New York Times bestseller that won Hale a Newbery Honor in 2006. The book was also made into a play that premiered at Brigham Young University in 2015. She has published two bestsellers in that series entitled Princess Academy: Palace of Stone and Princess Academy: The Forgotten Sisters.
Hale also wrote a stand-alone book entitled Book of a Thousand Days, which received a Cybils award. Another young adult novel is Kind of a Big Deal. She was approached by the Mattel company to write a book to correspond with their Ever After dolls and animated short. She agreed, and her book, Ever After High: The Storybook of Legends, debuted on the New York Times bestseller list (Children’s Middle Grade) at number 7 in October 2013. Subsequent titles in the Ever After series appeared in 2013: Raven Queen’s Story, Apple White’s Story, Ashlynn Ella’s Story, Madeline Hatter’s Story, Briar Beauty’s Story, The Tale of Two Sisters, and Hunter Huntsman’s Story. Titles in 2014 includeThe Unfairest of Them All.
Dangerous, a young adult novel, was released in 2014. Hale also penned Fire and Ice, the fourth volume in a multi-author fantasy series called Spirit Animals.
She penned two popular graphic novel memoirs Real Friends and Best Friends.
Austenland, Hale’s first book for adults, is now a major motion picture. She co-wrote the screenplay with director Jerusha Hess. A companion novel, Midnight in Austenland, is now in paperback. Her third book for adults, The Actor and the Housewife, was published in 2009. She has won numerous awards for all of her books.
Hale and her husband, Dean Hale, wrote two graphic novels, Rapunzel’s Revenge and Calamity Jack. Their first chapter book series, The Princess in Black (2014–) has twelve books as of 2023.[1] They also penned two books about Marvel's Squirrel Girl; a young Wonder Woman book for DC entitled Diana, Princess of the Amazons. They live in Utah with their four children.
Hale's book Itty-Bitty Kitty-Corn,written for ages 3 to 5, was pulled from the bookshelves in Katy, Texas. Early in 2023, a member of the Katy Independent School District board of education in Texas flagged the book as containing “sexually suggestive” material, deeming it out of compliance with Texas law HB900, which prohibits possession, acquisition, and purchase of books rated sexually explicit material by schools and permits their exclusion. The Deseret News reported:
- “I’m not sure where the ‘suggestive’ part came in. I’ve never been able to get anybody to tell me what that was in reference to,” said Hale.
- “Another thing they objected to was using ‘they’ as a singular pronoun, which is also not in the book. ‘They’ was only ever used for multiple characters, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it wasn’t there. So this was a misreading, somebody who has misread this book,” she said.
- . . . none of her books are on banned books lists but she has learned that some of her books have been quietly removed from circulation in school libraries.
- “If that’s happening to me, I know that’s happening to a lot of other writers as well. What’s actually happening is much larger than the list that we’re actually seeing,” she said.
- Hale said she believes the energy behind efforts to remove books from circulation in school libraries is fear based.
- “I’ve been told the problem with it (‘Itty-Bitty Kitty-Corn’) is it encourages children to be who they are,” said Hale, mother of four children.
- “If you tell your child to be who they are, and you can’t control what they’re going to become, and that’s really scary,” she said.
- The response to fear is control, Hale said, “and that’s what we’re seeing.”
The article also noted that "book challenges and removals have increased nationwide over the past two years, which The New York Times reports came about with the rise of parents’ rights groups formed to challenge COVID-19 restrictions in schools during the pandemic now pivoting to examining school library collections and waging challenges."
Hale spoke during Banned Books Week at the University of Utah’s Marriott Library in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, October 4, 2023.[2]
Hale was reared as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. However, she stopped attending in 2016.[3]
- The Books of Bayern series
- Princess Academy series
- The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl series
- Every After High series
- Rapunzel's Revenge series
- Real Friends series
- The Princess in Black series
- Diana: Princess of the Amazons series
- Itty-Bitty Kitty-Corn series
- Austenland series
- Book of a Thousand Days
- Kind of a Big Deal
- Dangerous
- Spirit Animals Book 4: Fire and Ice
- The Actor and the Housewife
