McKinley spent her childhood and teen years moving from place to place as her father got transferred to different countries with the navy. Everywhere she went, books were her constant companion. As a teenager she began to dream up elaborate stories about an imaginary land called Damar — a land that would later become the setting for her award winning books The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown. To help pay the bills while she took time to start writing the stories down, she worked as a research assistant, a bookseller and a horse trainer. Then, in the middle of writing the Damar series the idea came to her to rewrite the story of Beauty andthe Beast. Beauty was picked up by the first publisher who saw it, and became an instant classic.
