E. Lockhart

Jenkins grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Seattle, Washington. In high school she attended summer drama schools at Northwestern University and the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis. She attended Lakeside School, a private high school in North Seattle. E. Lockhart went to Vassar College—where she studied illustrated books and interviewed Barry Moser for her senior thesis—and graduate school at Columbia University, where she earned a doctorate in English literature. She currently lives in the New York City area.

Under her real name Jenkins has collaborated with illustrators to produce children’s picture books. They have received honors including the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Platinum Book Award (the original Toys Go Out, illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky) and two runners-up for Boston Globe–Horn Book Award (Five Creatures, illus. Tomek Bogacki, and That New Animal, illus. Pierre Pratt).

Jenkins writes as E. Lockhart for the young adult market; “Lockhart” was the family name of her mother’s mother. Her first book by Lockhart was a novel, The Boyfriend List, published by Random House Dell Delacorte Press in 2005. There are three sequels, The Boy Book (2006), The Treasure Map of Boys (2009), and Real Live Boyfriends (2010), and the four are also known collectively as the Ruby Oliver novels after their central protagonist. Another novel for teens, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (2008), was a finalist for both the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and the Michael L. Printz Award. We Were Liars made the shortlist of four books for the 2014 Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. The annual prize judged by British children’s writers recognizes the year’s best U.K.-published book by a writer who has not previously won it.

Emily Jenkins (born 1967), who sometimes uses the pen name E. Lockhart, is an American writer of children’s picture books, young-adult novels, and adult fiction. She is known best for the Ruby Oliver quartet (which begins with The Boyfriend List), The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, and We Were Liars.

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