Fox Cities Book Festival: Connecting writers and readers across our diverse communities.

Elizabeth Wein is a church bell ringer, a recreational pilot, and the owner of about a thousand maps. She grew up in England, Jamaica, and Pennsylvania, and now holds both American and British citizenship. She has lived in Scotland since 2000, where she learned to fly and gained her private pilot’s license at the Scottish Aero Club. Since then, flight has inspired many of her young adult novels, and she is best known for her historical fiction about young women as aviators in World War II, including Code Name Verity (2012), which won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America and became a Number 1 New York Times bestseller in 2020. Her non-fiction about women in aviation, A Thousand Sisters: The Heroic Airwomen of the Soviet Union in World War II, was a Finalist for YALSA’s Excellence in Non-Fiction Award in 2020. Elizabeth’s most recent novel, The Enigma Game (2020), is a World War II thriller about three very different young people working together on a remote Scottish air force base. Elizabeth has a PhD in Folklore & Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. She is married to games developer Tim Gatland and they have two grown children.