Christelle Dabos
novelist
Christelle Dabos (born 1980) is a French author best known for The Mirror Visitor quartet, a fantasy series that has sold over a million copies at Gallimard Jeunesse and has been translated into twenty different languages. Dabos achieved success when her debut novel, A Winter's Promise, was awarded first place at the 2013 Gallimard-RTL-Télérama First Novel competition.
Life and career
Christelle Dabos was born in 1980 in Cannes on the Côte d'Azur and grew up in a family of musicians. The author moved across the border to a village near La Louvière in Wallonia, Belgium, in 2005 and unsuccessfully sought work as a librarian.
Dabos began writing The Mirror Visitor quartet in 2007, but shortly after she was diagnosed with cancer in her jaw and had to undergo surgery and jaw reconstruction. In her convalescence, she turned to the website Plume d'argent, a repository for fanfiction and original fiction where writers could exchange feedback. After becoming an administrator on the platform, Dabos was encouraged by her fellow writers to submit her first novel, the first volume of The Mirror Visitor quartet entitled A Winter's Promise, to the Gallimard-RTL-Télérama First Novel competition, which she subsequently won in 2013. The novel was also named Best Book of the Year by critics and publications in the United States, including Entertainment Weekly, Bustle, Publishers Weekly, and Chicago Review of Books. The Mirror Visitor quartet narrates the adventures of Ophelia, a girl with the power to read the past of objects as well as the ability to pass through mirrors. The fantastical world in which the story is set includes 21 major arks, the remains of Earth after a cataclysmic event shattered it.
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This entry incorporates text from “Christelle Dabos” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.