Elizabeth Wein

I was born in New York City in 1964. My family spent two years in England and three years in Jamaica, and as a child I was fluent in Jamaican patois. When my parents separated, my mother moved us to her home state of Pennsylvania. When she died in a car accident in 1978, her wonderful mother, Betty Flocken, took me in.

After getting a BA from Yale University, I went back to England, where I learned to ring church bells in the English style known as "change ringing." While I was working on my PhD in Folklore at the University of Pennsylvania, I met my future husband at a bell ringers' dinner-dance. He is British, and in 1995 I moved to England with him, and we settled in Scotland in 2000, which is where we raised our two children and is where we live now. I hold both American and British citizenship.

I learned to fly in Scotland and took my private pilot's license in 2003. Inspired by this new skill, flying became the core theme of my writing over the past decades. I have now written numerous aviation-inspired fiction and non-fiction books for young people, and my best-known book, Code Name Verity, became a Number 1 New York Times bestseller.