Ellen Klages was born in Ohio, but has lived in San Francisco for more than fifty years.

Her first novel,  The Green Glass Sea (2006), won the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, the Lopez Award for Children’s Literature, and the New Mexico State Book Award for Young Adult Literature. It was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award, the Quills Award, and the Locus Award. A sequel, White Sands, Red Menace (2008), won the California and New Mexico Book awards in the Young Adult category. Her third novel, Out of Left Field, won the Ohioana Book Award and the Children’s Hostory Book Prize.

Her novelette, “Basement Magic,” won the Nebula Award in 2005, and her novella, “Wakulla Springs,” (co-authored with Andy Duncan) was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards and won the World Fantasy Award in 2014. Her 2017 novelette, “Passing Strange,” won the British Fantasy Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Gaylactic Spectrum Award. It was a Nebula finalist.

Many of her other stories have been on the final ballots for numerous awards, and have been translated into Chinese, Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Polish, and Swedish. Her short story collections, Portable Childhoods (2007), and Wicked Wonders (2018) were finalists for the World Fantasy Award.

In addition to her writing, she is a graduate of the Second City Conservatory, the Clarion South Workshop, and served for twenty years on the Motherboard of the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award. In 2023, she was named a Distinguised Alumna of Bexley Hight School, and in 2024, she was a contestant on Jeopardy!

Ellen lives in a small house full of old toys and vintage magazines. She has a cluttered studio where she makes strange and wondrous things.