H. G. Parry

H. G. PARRY is the author of The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep (2019), The Shadow Histories duology (2020-2021), The Magician's Daughter (2023), Heartless (2024), and The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door (2024), as well as several short stories with very long titles.

Born in Auckland, she grew up in Matamata, a small farming community in New Zealand most famous for being where Peter Jackson filmed Hobbiton for The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Unfortunately, she didn't read Tolkien until the films were already finished and missed out on being a hobbit, something she has spent the rest of her life trying to put right.

In 2007 she moved to Wellington to study English Literature, Classics, and Film at Victoria University, and fell deeply in love with both the city and academia. She completed her BA, and then a Masters degree in English Literature that focused on J.R.R. Tolkien and connections to classical epic in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. (Peter Jackson still didn't call her, even though he was now making The Hobbit trilogy and once again filming Hobbiton in her home town.) In 2013 she somehow managed to convince Victoria University to give her a scholarship to study children's books, and embarked on a PhD that focused on Children's Fantasy and the Epic Tradition. Over the next three years, she wrote on King Arthur, Narnia, and Watership Down, travelled overseas to archives in Oxford and Newcastle to read C.S. Lewis's journals and Philip Pullman's drafts, spoke at conferences in Worcester and Dunedin, and spent exactly the right amount of time in libraries.

After obtaining her doctorate, she moved to a house by the beach on the nearby Kapiti Coast with her sister, an English teacher. She worked as a teaching assistant, research assistant, and occasional guest lecturer at both Victoria and Massey University, and taught a wide and eclectic variety of courses, in everything from Shakespeare to Hollywood Cinema to Victorian Novels. She also travelled frequently throughout the UK, mostly to visit the houses of the Victorian novelists and poets about whom she was teaching and writing.