Sarah Beth Durst, born Sarah Beth Angelini, grew up in
Northborough, Massachusetts. As a child, she attended
Lincoln Street Elementary School in Northborough. She later attended
Bancroft School in
Worcester, from which she graduated in 1992. While still in high school, she wrote a musical about intersections between fairy tales and the real world, which she has described as "horrible." She would later return to these themes in her
debut novel,
Into the Wild. After finishing high school, Durst attended
Princeton University, which serves as the setting for her fourth novel,
Enchanted Ivy. At Princeton, Durst majored in English literature and completed a concentration in theater and dance. After graduating from Princeton in 1996, Durst lived briefly in the UK before returning to Massachusetts for several years. Durst currently resides in
Stony Brook, New York. In 2007, Durst published her first novel,
Into the Wild, for young adults.
Into the Wild and its 2008 sequel,
Out of the Wild, draw on fairy tale characters living in the real world to explore questions of free will. The Wild is an amoral force that seeks to organize people into stories with no concern for the effects these rearrangements have on individuals' lives. Landmarks from Central Massachusetts, where Durst grew up, feature in both novels; these include the
Higgins Armory and
Bancroft Tower.
Into the Wild was a finalist for the
Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy, the first of multiple nominations for the Andre Norton Award that Durst's work has received. Durst returned to the theme of fairy tales in 2009 with
Ice, a modern retelling of the fairy tale
East of the Sun, West of the Moon. In Durst's version, the protagonist is an aspiring arctic researcher in Alaska who encounters and marries a polar bear munaqsri, or transporter of souls. With
Ice, Durst became a finalist for an Andre Norton Award for a second time.
Ice was followed by
Enchanted Ivy in 2010, set at Princeton University, where Durst studied as an undergrad. In 2011 Durst published
Drink, Slay, Love, a young adult novel about vampires. Its title is a parody of
Eat, Pray, Love, a bestselling memoir by
Elizabeth Gilbert, and reflects the
tongue-in-cheek humor of the novel.
Drink, Slay, Love was made into a Lifetime movie directed by
Vanessa Parise and produced by
Bella Thorne. Pearl, the novel's sixteen-year-old vampire protagonist, is played by
Cierra Ramirez. The film aired in September 2017. Durst won her first writing award for
Vessel, published in 2012.
Vessel won a
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children's Literature and was a finalist for an Andre Norton Award. Durst followed
Vessel with the young adult novel
Conjured in 2013, which was a finalist for a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. In 2014 Durst published
The Lost, her first novel for adults. That same year, Durst also published the young adult novel
Chasing Power, for the first time publishing not one novel, but two in a year. The subsequent year Durst published
The Girl Who Could Not Dream, written for middle grade readers and a finalist for a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. In 2016, Durst published her second novel for adults, an epic fantasy entitled
The Queen of Blood. The first in Durst's Queens of Renthia series,
The Queen of Blood won an ALA Alex Award. Durst has stated that
The Queen of Blood was inspired in part by a mishap she experienced at a writer's retreat in the
Poconos. The novel's cover was designed by illustrator
Stephan Martiniere. In 2024, Durst had a breakthrough success with
The Spellshop, which was considered a leading example of the new subgenre of "
cozy fantasy"; it spent six weeks on
The New York Times Best Seller List and multiple weeks on other bestseller lists. In 2025 her
The Enchanted Greenhouse, set in the same world, debuted at #2 on The New York Times Best Seller List. == Bibliography ==