Robin Stevens

Robin Stevens is a British-American author best known for historical mysteries written for children and young adults. Born in California, she moved to England at the age of three and grew up in Oxford before attending Cheltenham Ladies’ College and studying at the University of Warwick. She later completed a master’s degree focused on crime fiction and worked as a publishing editor before becoming a full-time author. Her experience of boarding-school life helped inspire the fictional Deepdean School for Girls, while her knowledge of Golden Age detective fiction informs the settings, structures and carefully planted clues of her novels.

Stevens’s best-known books are the Murder Most Unladylike mysteries, set during the 1930s and centred on schoolgirl detectives Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong. Beginning with Murder Most Unladylike, the series follows the pair through cases set in an English boarding school, country houses, Cambridge, London, Hong Kong and aboard a Nile steamer, combining classic murder-mystery plots with questions of friendship, prejudice, class and the restricted expectations placed upon girls. Stevens continues this historical world in the Ministry of Unladylike Activity series, set during the Second World War and following May Wong, Eric Jones and Nuala O’Malley as they are recruited by a secret government organisation that trains children as spies.