Mira Bartók is the author/illustrator of The Wonderling: Songcatcher, book one in a middle-grade fantasy duology, published by Candlewick Press. The Wonderling has been translated into many languages, and is in development to be a feature film, directed by award-winning British director, Stephen Daldry (The Crown, Billy Elliot, The Reader, etc.), and produced by Working Title Films and Disney. (You can read more about the crazy book to movie deal HERE and HERE).
Mira is also the author/illustrator of The Memory Palace, a New York Times
bestselling memoir and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. Her writing for adults has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, noted in The Best American Essays series and has appeared in numerous literary journals, magazines and anthologies.
She has also written numerous books on ancient and indigenous cultures for children (The Ancient and Living Stencil Series) and in 1997, while living on a Fulbright Grant in a Sami village above the Arctic Circle in Norway, she collaborated with a local storyteller and published an illustrated book of traditional Sami stories called Fox Has His Day: Tales from the Far, Far North.
Before she became a full-time author, Mira was a visual artist and exhibited her work in galleries and museums in the United States and abroad. She has also worked as a museum lecturer, public programmer, and cultural specialist at some of the greatest institutions in the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Field Museum of Natural History at Chicago, the Chicago Children's Museum, the Lincoln Park Children's Zoo, the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, and others. Many of Mira's ideas derive from her experiences working at these amazing institutions.
Mira lives with a permanent disability, a traumatic brain injury (TBI) from a serious car accident many years ago. She is currently working on a picture book for children about the way her brain works, in the hopes that young readers will gain more empathy for themselves and for others on the neurodiverse spectrum. She lives in Western Massachusetts with her musician husband Doug Plavin and their little dog Birdie. And as you can see by this picture, Birdie is clearly in charge.
