Cassandra Clare

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Cassandra Clare was born to American parents in Teheran, Iran and spent much of her childhood traveling the world with her family. She lived in France, England and Switzerland before she was ten years old. Since her family moved around so much she found familiarity in books and went everywhere with a book under her arm. She spent her high school years in Los Angeles where she used to write stories to amuse her classmates, including an epic novel called 'The Beautiful Cassandra' based on a Jane Austen short story of the same name (and which later inspired her pen name). After college, Cassie lived in Los Angeles and New York where she worked at various entertainment magazines reporting on Brad and Angelina's world travels and Britney Spears' wardrobe malfunctions. She started working on her YA novel, 'City of Bones', in 2004, inspired by the urban landscape of Manhattan, her favourite city.

Author's Comment: Most people who love to write start with a love of reading. I started writing books when I was about 12. They were all terrible and all in different genres. I wrote a terrible vampire novel and a terrible mystery novel and a terrible romance novel and a terrible Arthurian novel. Then I went to college and I took some writing classes, and I didn't really enjoy them, and I figured maybe I didn't want to be a fiction writer. After college I worked as a journalist and I also worked part-time in a children's bookstore. It was working in the children's bookstore and starting to re-read the books I'd read when I was a kid that rekindled my desire to write. I started writing again, and went through several different novel ideas before I moved to New York City from Los Angeles, which is what inspired the idea of setting a book in New York and its environs. From that, City of Bones developed.

Nationality: American