Katherine Applegate

Katherine Applegate (born 1956 in Ann Arbor, Michigan) is an American author of children's and young adult fiction, best known for the Animorphs series and for The One and Only Ivan, which won the 2013 Newbery Medal.

Applegate has written much of her work with her husband, Michael Grant, whom she married in 1979. Credited as K. A. Applegate, the pair created Animorphs, published by Scholastic from June 1996 to May 2001: 54 main books plus 10 companion books. Within about eighteen months of the first book there were close to ten million copies in print, and many of the later volumes were ghostwritten from Applegate's detailed outlines. They followed it with Everworld (1999 to 2001) and Remnants (2001 to 2003). Earlier in her career she also wrote under several pseudonyms, including L. E. Blair, Beth Kincaid and, with Grant, Katherine Kendall for Harlequin romances.

Her later solo novels for HarperCollins include Home of the Brave (2007), which won the SCBWI Golden Kite Award, and The One and Only Ivan (2012), illustrated by Patricia Castelao. Ivan is based on a real western lowland gorilla who spent about 27 years in a shopping-mall enclosure in Tacoma, Washington, before moving to Zoo Atlanta in 1994. Disney adapted it as a film released on Disney+ in 2020. She has since published Crenshaw (2015), Wishtree (2017) and the sequel The One and Only Bob (2020).

For collectors: The key book is the first printing of The One and Only Ivan, published by HarperCollins in 2012 and awarded the Newbery Medal the following year. Home of the Brave (HarperCollins, 2007) is her earlier prize-winner. Among her series work, the original Scholastic Animorphs paperbacks from 1996 onwards, issued under the K. A. Applegate name, are the original editions of the series.