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Emily Kate Johnston is a Canadian author and forensic archaeologist.

Biography and Career
Johnston started writing fan fiction in 2002, and wrote her first manuscript in 2009. Her first book, The Story of Owen: Dragon Slayer of Trondheim, was published in 2014, and is set in an alternate present-day Ontario where dragons are both real and a menace. Praised by The New York Times as "a clever first step in the career of a novelist who [...] has many more songs to sing", it was nominated for the William C. Morris Award in 2015. A sequel, Prairie Fire, followed in 2015.

Johnston's third book was A Thousand Nights, a retelling of One Thousand and One Nights. Johnston drew on C.S. Lewis's descriptions of the expanse, the precision and the desolation of the desert in The Horse and His Boy when she wrote the book. A companion book, Spindle, followed in 2016, which was a reinterpretation of Sleeping Beauty.

Her fifth novel, Exit, Pursued By A Bear, was published in 2016. Inspired by Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, it tells the story of cheer-leading captain Hermione Winters, who discovers she is pregnant after being sexually assaulted at a camp party. It was written partially as a challenge, and partially as a response to Stephen Woodworth's 2013 bill to re-criminalise abortion. It was named a "Book of the Year" by several organisations, including NPR, Publishers Weekly, and the New York Public Library. It won the Canadian Children's Book Centre's Amy Mathers Teen Book Award in 2017.

Johnston is a self-proclaimed Star Wars fan and was asked to write a book on the character Ahsoka Tano. Published in October 2016, Ahsoka fills in the gap between her appearances in The Clone Wars and Rebels. Her second Star Wars novel, Queen's Shadow, is scheduled for released in March 2019. Featuring Padme Amidala, it will be set prior to the events of The Phantom Menace. Additionally, she has also written the story By Whatever Sun, focusing on Miara Larte, a character Johnston created within Ahsoka, and set during the events of A New Hope.

Johnston's most recent novel is That Inevitable Victorian Thing, which she describes as a "Near-future Sci-fi Canadian Idealistic Romance", and was published in 2017.

She credits her discipline in academic writing for helping her time management while writing prose; and states she is a fast writer - she wrote A Thousand Nights in "about 20 days", and writes with little disturbance. She advises early and young writers to learn to finish projects as practice in self-discipline and editing.

Her favourite authors are Jo Graham, Elizabeth Wein, Tessa Gratton, Kiersten White, Madeleine L’Engle, JRR Tolkien, David Eddings, CS Lewis, and Holly Black. She plays the the alto saxophone and the clarinet.

Novels

 * The Story of Owen: Dragon Slayer of Trondheim (2014)
 * Prairie Fire (2015)
 * A Thousand Nights (2015)
 * Spindle (2016) - also published as Kingdom of Sleep
 * Exit, Pursued By A Bear (2016)
 * That Inevitable Victorian Thing (2017)
 * The Afterward (2019)

Short Stories

 * Work In Progress (2017) in Three Sides of A Heart: Stories about Love Triangles, edited by Natalie Parker

Star Wars

 * Ahsoka (2016)
 * By Whatever Sun (2017), short story in From A Certain Point Of View
 * Queen's Shadow (2019)

Awards

 * 2015: William C. Morris Award, shortlist (The Story of Owen: Dragon Slayer of Trondheim)
 * 2017: Amy Mathers Teen Book Award in 2017, winner (Exit, Pursued By A Bear)