Rachael King is a writer, reviewer, former literary festival director and ex-bass player from Aotearoa New Zealand. Secrets at Red Rocks won the Esther Glen Medal in 2013 and in 2025 was adapted into an Emmy award-winning television series. The Grimmelings, published in the UK by Guppy Books in 2024, was longlisted for the UKLA awards, named a New York Public Library best book of 2025, and won several awards in New Zealand. The novelist David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) called it ‘a compelling, lovingly-crafted novel about magic, liminal spaces, language and folkloric fusion… tense and eery with flashes of beauty’. Her first book for young adults, the folk horror Song of the Saltings, was released in the UK in July 2026. Lucy Strange called it ‘utterly gripping and hauntingly beautiful’. All three books reflect Rachael’s love for, and obsession with the Scottish folklore of her ancestors – the weirder the better. Rachael’s adult novels, The Sound of Butterflies (Picador, 2006) and Magpie Hall (Random House, 2009), were together translated into nine languages. She holds a Masters in Creative Writing from Victoria University in Wellington.