"So sorry to get you into writing. What a horrible thing to inflict on you. Should have just sold you crack."
— K. A. Applegate, in a Reddit Q&A session in 2011
Katherine Alice Applegate (born October 9, 1956) is an American science fiction author from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who is best known for writing Animorphs and Everworld with her husband, Michael Grant.
She is also the winner of the 2013 Newbery Medal for The One and Only Ivan, which was released as a motion picture by Disney in August 2020, direct to Disney+. (See the trailer for that here.) She is not retired, no matter what Animorphs fans might tell you - she's just writing under her first and last name.
Her personal website can be found here and her Twitter can be found here.
Works by Katherine Applegate with their own trope pages include:
Other works by Katherine Applegate include
- Wishtree
- Crenshaw
- The Buffalo Storm
- Home of the Brave
- Willowdeen
- The Roscoe Riley Rules Series
- The Making Out series, originally published as Boyfriends/Girlfriends, republished as The Islanders in 2015.
- The Making Waves series, originally published as Ocean City
Katherine Applegate and her works provide examples of:
- Approval of God: She's been very supportive of Animorphs fandom. Except the artwork of Tobias doing it with Harry Potter.
- Creator Couple: With Michael Grant in Animorphs, Everworld, Remnants, Making Out, and Eve and Adam.
- Dear Negative Reader: She wrote a letter to the Animorphs fans who didn't like the ending.
- Digital Piracy Is Okay: In 2011, when the Animorphs books were still out of print, she stated she had no objection to people continuing to circulate them as free ebooks. She would've preferred to have them officially available for sale in ebook form, but it wasn't something Scholastic was actively doing at the time.
- Keep Circulating the Tapes: This is what she wants Animorphs fans to do.
- Mean Boss: To her ghostwriters, according to a Reddit AMA:"[My husband and I] started as ghostwriters, so we saw it more as opportunity. We paid well, but not very well to be honest. We wrote outlines (we suck at outlines) and then got all bitchy when we didn't like what we got. Neither of us is an editor so we weren't really capable of offering decent guidance. So we tended just to sort of slash and burn. Basically without meaning to be we were probably horrible assholes to work with."
- Moustache de Plume: Ambiguous initials sub-type. Her full name is Katherine Alice Applegate. She eventually switched to using her first name.
- Old Shame:
- Back in The '90s, she wrote Barf-O-Rama, which is exactly what it sounds like based on the name: disgusting books built around barf scenes. For obvious reasons, it was done under a pseudonym.
- Really, anything she did before Animorphs. And even then, she didn't like the endings of Everworld and Remnants any more than her fans did, and she's also lamented the number of Plot Holes in Animorphs that fans have found.
- She Also Did: Applegate was a ghostwriter for Sweet Valley Twins, a Spin-Off of Sweet Valley High, before she started writing her own books.
