Elizabeth Wein - Literary Aviatrix

Elizabeth Wein devoured aviation literature before she was a pilot. She read K.M. Peyton’s Flambards series in high school, and moved on to Antoine de St. Exupery and Anne Morrow Lindbergh – she consumed all these with multiple re-reads (including struggling through Wind, Sand, and Stars; Flight to Arras; and Southern Mail in the original French). Her husband, when she met him, had just completed a PPL and it was only natural – after nearly ten years of flying in the right-hand seat – that eventually she would learn to fly herself.

When she started flying, she desperately wanted to write about it, and even though she continued her Arthurian spin-off series, she wrote and published several short stories about flight. Eventually a novel, Code Name Verity (2012), erupted from this experience, a thriller that celebrates the friendship of a pilot and a spy, both young women, in World War II. Since then, the joy of flight soars at the heart of most of her recent novels, and she’s even produced non-fiction about flying in A Thousand Sisters: The Heroic Airwomen of the Soviet Union in World War II. She has learned to use historical events to spark stories of ordinary young people proving themselves in extraordinary times – letting the past reflect our present.

American by birth, Elizabeth spent most of her twenties getting a PhD in Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania, and didn’t get together with said husband until she was nearly thirty. At that point, she had already begun publishing historical fiction for young adult readers. After their move to Scotland, she learned to fly at the Scottish Aero Club in 2003, and paid for it with the advance for her second novel, A Coalition of Lions (2003), which was set in sixth-century Ethiopia and had absolutely nothing to do about flying! They have now lived in Scotland for over twenty years, raised two children there, and she has been a dual citizen since 2016.

For Elizabeth, the best thing about being an author today is the chance to speak to readers and to encourage their own writing projects. She has run workshops literally all over the world, in Australia, China, North America and Europe! She likes to bring a hands-on element to her events, sharing wartime and aviation artefacts and images with her young audiences, and using these to help inspire creativity.

Although she has found it difficult to keep her license current, she loves being in the air, and flying is undoubtedly the single thing that has shaped her literary career and brought her the success that she enjoys as an author.