Annie Barrows was born in 1962 in San Diego, California, but quickly moved to a small town called San Anselmo in the San Francisco Bay Area. She spent most of her childhood at the library. She wouldn’t leave, so they hired her to shelve books at the age of 12.

Annie attended UC Berkeley and received a B. A. in Medieval History. She knows more than the average person about third-century saints. Under the impression that a career in publishing meant she’d get to read a lot, Annie became a proofreader at an art magazine and later an editor at a textbook publishing company. In 1988, Chronicle Books hired Annie as an editorial assistant, from which platform she became successively assistant editor, managing editor, Editor and Senior Editor. Somewhere in this trajectory, she acquired GRIFFIN & SABINE, Chronicle’s first New York Times bestseller.

In 1996, Annie received her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Mills College and had a baby, a confluence of events that persuaded her to leave editorial work and move into writing. She wrote several nonfiction books on topics ranging from fortune-telling to opera before turning her attention to children’s books. In 2006, the first book in her children’s series, Ivy + Bean, was published. This title, an ALA Notable Book for 2007, was followed by nine others. The Ivy + Bean series appears with some regularity on the New York Times bestseller list and a number of other national bestseller lists. The Ivy + Bean books have been translated into 14 languages; in 2013 "Ivy + Bean: The Musical" premiered in the San Francisco Bay Area. A novel for older children, THE MAGIC HALF, was published by BloomsburyUSA in 2008. Its sequel, MAGIC IN THE MIX, came out in 2014.

In addition to her children’s books, Annie is the co-author, with her aunt Mary Ann Shaffer, of THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY, which was published by The Dial Press in 2008. A New York Times bestseller, THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY has been published in 37 countries and 32 languages.

Annie lives in Northern California with her husband and two daughters.

Books by Annie Barrows

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows - Fiction

Written with warmth and humor as a series of letters, this novel is a celebration of the written word in all its guises, and of finding connection in the most surprising ways.