Stephenie Meyer
Stephenie Meyer was born on December 24, 1973, in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. She was the second of six children in a Mormon family, an upbringing whose values around love, commitment, and the tension between desire and restraint would deeply colour her fiction. She attended Brigham Young University on a National Merit Scholarship, graduating in 1997 with a degree in English literature, and subsequently devoted herself to raising her three sons. She had no formal creative writing training before the dream that would change her life.
In June 2003, Meyer dreamed vividly of a young woman and a handsome, pale young man in a sunlit meadow, discussing the impossibility and irresistibility of their relationship: he was a vampire who thirsted for her blood and yet loved her too deeply to act on that desire. She wrote the scene down immediately, and it became the famous meadow chapter of Twilight. She completed the novel in a matter of months. Twilight was acquired by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers and published in 2005. The novel introduces seventeen-year-old Bella Swan, who moves to the rainy town of Forks, Washington, and falls deeply in love with the mysterious Edward Cullen, who belongs to a vampire family that has chosen to abstain from human blood. The novel’s intense focus on romantic longing found an enormous and passionate readership, primarily among teenage girls and young women but extending far beyond that demographic. The three sequels, New Moon (2006), Eclipse (2007), and Breaking Dawn (2008), each debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
The Twilight Saga sold over one hundred million copies worldwide and was translated into thirty-seven languages. The five-film adaptation series (2008-2012), starring Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, grossed over three billion dollars at the global box office, spawning one of the defining pop cultural phenomena of the late 2000s. Meyer returned to the series with Midnight Sun (2020), a retelling of Twilight from Edward’s perspective, which became an instant bestseller. She has also written the science fiction novel The Host (2008).
Meyer has received the British Book Award for Children’s Book of the Year and has been listed among Forbes magazine’s most powerful celebrities. Her influence on the young adult genre, particularly on the vampire romance and paranormal romance subgenres, is profound. While her work has generated critical debate about its gender politics, its cultural impact is indisputable, and Twilight remains one of the most widely read novels of the twenty-first century.
