Megan Whalen Turner was born on November 21, 1965, in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, when her father, Donald Peyton Whalen, was stationed there with the United States Army. As a child, Megan read widely.

Like many would-be writers, when she ran out of stories she wanted to read she decided to write her own. Unfortunately, she did not quite know how to get started at this point. She tried Roald Dahl's advice to young writers to keep a notebook of story ideas, but in her case "the idea just sat there on the page. It did not magically turn into a story the way it was supposed to." So she gave up on writing books for quite a while, turning her attention back to reading them instead.

At the University of Chicago she was an English major. For a senior project she decided to work on children's...