Marie Lu is a #1 New York Times bestselling author best known for her Legend quartet and The Young Elites trilogy. A Chinese American author born in 1984 in Wuxi, China, Lu moved to Beijing as a child. Her family moved to the United States in 1989 during the Tiananmen Square Protest.

Marie Lu learned English through her passion for writing stories while growing up. She studied political science and biology at the University of Southern California. Upon graduation, she went on to work for Disney Interactive Studios as a Flash artist in the video game industry. With a degree in political science and a professional background in the video game industry, Lu fell in love with dystopian books. Dystopian is a form of speculative fiction, based in science-fiction in some ways, which offers typically dark versions of the future. Typically, dystopian societies are in a state of catastrophic decline; their characters are often plagued by environmental decay, oppressive technology, or authoritarian government control. The highly political and often militaristic nature of dystopian fiction is centerstage for Lu’s dystopian novels. Much of Marie Lu’s inspiration for dystopian settings and situations comes from exaggerating something about the real world and creating a story about how to fix that problem.