Annette Curtis Klause was born on June 20, 1953, in Bristol, England. The house in which she lived as a small child was on a cobblestone street; she says it appears in her story "The Bogey Man." At seven, she moved with her family to Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, in the north of England. Her memories of the next few years are full of trips with her father and sister to the library, where she discovered Rosemary Sutcliff's historical novels and C. S. Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia." She also found stacks of science fiction paperbacks and magazines to read at home, and started writing and illustrating her own little books.

When she was fifteen, her family came to Washington, D.C. The move was initially only for a year, while her father worked in his specialty of radiology. It turned out to be permanent. Annette finished high school in...