Justine Larbalestier

Justine Larbalestier is an Australian young-adult novelist known for genre-aware, often metafictional fiction that interrogates the conventions it works in. Her Magic or Madness trilogy blends contemporary fantasy with an unusually clear-eyed take on mental illness, and Liar (2009) is a much-discussed unreliable-narrator novel about a habitual liar whose account of her own story the reader is never quite able to trust -- a book that also drew significant attention for a whitewashed original cover that Larbalestier publicly and successfully pushed back against. She is married to fellow author Scott Westerfeld, with whom she has occasionally collaborated. In this catalogue she appears as co-author, with Sarah Rees Brennan, of Team Human (2012), a satirical vampire novel about a teenage girl determined to talk her best friend out of dating the school's brooding undead new student -- a deliberate send-up of paranormal-romance tropes from two authors who between them know the genre inside out.