C. S. Pacat

C. S. Pacat is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling Australian author, best known for the Captive Prince trilogy, published by Penguin Random House in 2015.

Early life

Pacat was born in Melbourne, Australia, and was educated at the University of Melbourne. She lived in several different cities including Perugia where she studied at Perugia University, and Tokyo, where she lived for five years. Pacat wrote the Captive Prince trilogy around her day job as a translator while training as a geologist.

Literary career

Pacat's first novel Captive Prince began as an online serial of original "slash" fiction on LiveJournal, where it garnered viral attention. Self-published in February 2013, Captive Prince was then acquired by Penguin Random House, and published commercially in April 2015 in multiple territories. The sequel Prince's Gambit was released in July 2015, and the final novel in the trilogy Kings Rising was released in February 2016. The series was short-listed for the Sara Douglass Book Series Award, part of the Aurealis Awards.

In 2017 she revealed that she was working on a new comic series Fence, about the world of fencing. The series has since been expanded to include a series of novels by Sarah Rees Brennan and was nominated for a GLAAD award in 2019.

In 2019 she announced a new trilogy, Dark Rise, a young adult fantasy novel series. The first installment hit the New York Times bestsellers list in October 2021 and was awarded the 2021 Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel.

Personal life

Pacat is queer and genderqueer, using both she/her and he/him pronouns. She identifies as "a proud wog". and states that this played an influence while writing the Captive Prince trilogy: "As for the influence on Captive Prince, I'm a bisexual wog, and Damen is a bisexual wog - so there's that....There's a lot of wog-politics in the series, although its rarely read from that perspective outside of Australia".