Mary Averling (born 1998) is a British-Canadian children's novelist and academic, best known for her Bram Stoker Award-nominated debut, The Curse of Eelgrass Bog.
Biography
Mary was born in Cambridgeshire and moved frequently as a child, living in Wiltshire, Ontario, and British Columbia before studying her BA in English and Creative Writing at the University of Victoria. She returned to England for her master's degree, which she completed at the University of Cambridge during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. While at Cambridge, Mary started writing The Curse of Eelgrass Bog and won Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge's Florence Staniforth Fiction Prize. She is currently a doctoral candidate at Queen's University at Kingston and English lecturer at Thompson Rivers University. Her research focuses on horror, Victorian fiction, ecocriticsm, and girlhood, with articles published by Brill Publishers, Routledge, and Peter Lang (publisher).
Career
Mary is signed with the Andrea Brown Literary Agency. The Curse of Eelgrass Bog sold at auction to G. P. Putnam's Sons children's imprint, and became a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection, a Target Book Club Pick, an Amazon Editors Pick, and an honoree on the American Library Association Rainbow Book List. It received a starred review from BookPage and was chosen as one of the publication's Best Books of 2024. The novel follows 12-year old Kess Pedrock and her sidekick, Shrunken Jim, as they search a witch-haunted bog for artifacts to save her family's Unnatural History Museum.
Mary's second novel, The Ghosts of Bitterfly Bay, released from Putnam in 2025, and was a finalist in the Manitoba Young Readers Choice Awards. A third novel, The Burn Beast, is set to release in September 2026. In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews called it "A quintessential thriller that burns like wildfire."
Personal life Mary lives in Kamloops, British Columbia.
Publications The Curse of Eelgrass Bog (2024) The Ghosts of Bitterfly Bay (2025) The Burn Beast (2026)
References