Deborah Harkness

Bestselling novelist Deborah Harkness is also a professor at the University of Southern California. A prize-winning historian, she specializes in the history of science and Europe in the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. She has been studying history—particularly the history of science, magic, and alchemy--for more than twenty-five years, so it’s safe to say she knows her way around a library card catalog or the computerized equivalent. Her career in fiction began at an airport bookshop in September of 2008 when she noticed the shelves were lined with supernatural fiction and asked herself “If there really are witches and vampires, what do they do for a living and why don’t I know any of them?” Her debut novel, A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES, was her answer to that question.
The first book in the All Souls series, A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES sold more than a million copies in the United States, also appearing in thirty-eight foreign editions, and was adapted by Sky into a television show of the same name.