Ransom Riggs is an American novelist born on February 3, 1979 in Maryland. After graduating from Pine View School for the Gifted, he attended Kenyon College to study English literature and later enrolled at the University of Southern California to study film. He then worked as a blogger for Mental Floss, a publication targeted toward youth and millennials. Over the years, Riggs had developed a passion for photography, and the photos he took eventually informed the plot and style of his first novel, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.
Miss Peregrine is a young-adult fantasy book that tells the story of Jacob Portman, a teenager who discovers that he is a descendant of the “peculiar” people, who each have a distinct superhuman trait. The second and third installments of the series, Hollow City and Library of Souls, respectively, each deal with Jacob’s battle against the hollowgast, an ancient species that threatens the livelihood of the peculiars.
When Riggs debuted the first novel of the trilogy, he was met with great praise and acclaim. Thus, it was difficult to maintain that momentum for the remainder of Jacob’s story. Yet, he succeeded in this daunting task as every part of the series received laudatory reviews. As Steve Nathans-Kelly of Paste Magazine writes, “The challenge Riggs faced in Library of Souls was to match the remarkably high standard set by the first two books in the series, either the mind-bending bafflements of the first book or the edge-of-your-seat action of the second. Riggs succeeds, delivering a thrilling conclusion.”
Since the release of Library of Souls in 2015, Ransom Riggs has published a spin-off to his wildly popular Miss Peregrine books entitled Tales of the Peculiar (2016).
