Michelle Sagara

Sagara is the eldest child of Japanese immigrants. As a child, Sagara loved reading Nancy Drew mysteries as well as the works of Enid Blyton and J. R. R. Tolkien. She studied physics, then English, at the University of Toronto before dropping out to pursue writing. After she married in 1990, she began publishing under Michelle West. Her debut book, Into the Dark Lands was published in 1991. She has said, in a 2008 interview: "I submitted the first novel to Del Rey books in 1987. It was rejected, but with a phone call, and in the end I revised the manuscript and sent it back. The revision was passed on to Lester del Rey, who was alive at the time. He rejected it with a four-page single space letter [that] had all the trademark curmudgeonliness for which he was famed. But buried in that four-page letter was a very definite 'This flashback of 94 pages needs to be its own damn book, and it should be book one.' So... I wrote that novel, and I submitted that novel, and that's the novel they bought."