Alma Alexander was born with ink in her veins, on the shores of an ancient river immortalised in music, in a country that no longer exists.She grew up in Africa, where she got to see elephants in the wild and hug lion cubs. She lived and worked on four continents and in seven countries before she was forty, not counting the new and unexplored country of Cyberspace where she met the man whom she was eventually to marry.

So much for the fantastical. The more workaday facts are that the writer now known as Alma Alexander was born Alma Hromic, in the city of Novi Sad, on the shores of the river Danube in what used to be Yugoslavia. At age 10, when her father was offered a position with the United Nations, she moved with her family first to Zambia, then Swaziland, and finally South Africa; somewhere in this period she completed her schooling in the United Kingdom, and then attended the University of Cape Town in South Africa from which she obtained several degrees, the highest of which was an MSc in Molecular Biology and Microbiology.

She tried research for a couple of years before a several things conspired to change the direction of her life. The New South Africa arrived, born in violence and guns and bombs and fire, and she witnessed first-hand the power of war and fury; the new order brought with it a redistribution of funding which meant that a career in pure blue-sky research got abruptly curtailed. Alma segued into a science writing/editing job with the Allergy Society of South Africa, and then emigrated to New Zealand to a calmer political climate fraught with less potential for personal peril of being in the way of a social change juggernaut. In New Zealand she worked for several years as a science and maths editor for eductional publisher Heinemann in their New Zealand offices and then, when the office got canned and folded back into the bigger Australian operation, freelanced as a writer and editor until she met R.A. ("Deck") Deckert on-line in a writing group and began a conversation which culminated in their marriage in 2000 at which time she moved to the United States to be with her American husband.

As Alma Hromic, she published a multitude of short stories in magazines and anthologies, including the prestigious 30th anniversary collection of the august London Magazine from the UK, and (to date) over a thousand book reviews both in print and online. She also published a number of book-length works ("The Dolphin's Daughter and other stories,", Longman UK, 1995; "Houses in Africa", autobiographical memoir, David Ling (New Zealand), 1995;"Letters from the Fire", an e-mail epistolary contemporary fiction novel co-written with her husband, 1999, Harper Collins New Zealand; the "Changer of Days" fantasy duology, Harper Collins New Zealand, 2001 and 2002).

Her career took off in the early years of the 21st century, with the publication (under the name Alma Alexander) of "The Secrets of Jin Shei" - currently published in 12 languages and more than 20 countries worldwide. The novel was followed by "Embers of Heaven" (Harper Collins UK and a number of foreign editions), and the reissue of her fantasy novels in the USA, Germany and Spain. She has also written a YA series, "Worldweavers", the first book of which ("Gift of the Unmage") came out in 2007 to critical and reader acclaim to be followed by "Spellspam" in 2008 and "Cybermage" in 2009. The YA books, featuring what a reviewer called "a core of fresh, wildly original magic", combine fantasy tropes in new and unexpected ways, ranging from the cutting-edge "cyber"-magic of computers and the electronic world to the ancient myths and legends of the Native American tradition and a heroine who has already found a following in YA circles.

She is currently - she is always - at work on a new novel.

Alma Alexander lives in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, with her husband, two cats, and assorted visiting wildlife that parades past her office windows through her cedar woods.

More information about the author can be found at her website

www.AlmaAlexander.com

and more information about the YA Worldweavers series is available at its own dedicated website

www.WorldWeaversWeb.com

Alma Alexander has a personal blog (where she often talks about writing and her influences) at

http://anghara.livejournal.com

and also blogs regularly on writing-related topics at

www.storytellersunplugged.com

and

www.sfnovelists.com