Press Kit

Short Bio

Isabelle Knight is the middle-grade fantasy author of the Enchantria series, which she began writing at age ten and published during her middle school years. A lifelong book and cat lover, she now resides somewhere in a book-filled apartment, surrounded by an unimaginable number of stuffed pandas and enough books to start her own bookstore. When she’s not writing about creepy shadows, daring heroines, and magical adventures, she’s talking about books, writing, and other writerly ramblings on her YouTube channel!

You can find her books on the Books page of this blog.

Long Bio

I wanted to be a lot of things when I grew up. Ballerina, chef, pop star, DJ, magician, author, and more. As you can see, author wasn’t exactly super high on that list. Sadly, I never became a ballerina, chef, pop star, and I have long since forgotten all my card tricks, though there may still be a chance of that happening!

A fun fact about me is that I wasn’t always an avid reader! It’s really shocking to so many people, but I believe seven-year-old me would’ve much rather stayed home to binge watch TV than read books. This was mainly because, at that time, I didn’t have that many books that interested me! However, I still recall the day when my mom bought a really heavy Oxford dictionary that also came with a free copy of The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden. I took that book and practically devoured it in three hours. And then I went back for countless re-reads!

I guess that goes to show that there’s a reader inside everyone – you just need the right books to bring them out! And a little later in my life, when I was around eight, I managed to get an ebook copy of Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted. Again, I still didn’t have that many books, and I wasn’t that huge of a reader. But Ella Enchanted was the first book I’d ever read that I really, really loved, and if my memory serves me right, I’ve read it about 50 times to this day! I loved staying inside Ella’s world, with the ogres and the fairies and the magic, and I especially loved reading the author’s note at the beginning of the book that told how she, as a kid, used to hog the bathroom in her apartment just to read!

But it wasn’t until two years later that I actually became an avid reader. When I was around nine or ten I really wanted to see a certain movie, except my parents wouldn’t let me. In compensation, they gave me the books. Those books were the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan, and I stayed up so late, just turning the pages to find out what happened to Percy and his friends!

Ever since then, I began practically scouring online bookstores to find books to beg my parents to buy and finally, they caved in and got me Kindle Unlimited, where I devoured the Warriors series by Erin Hunter (it remains till this day, one of my favorite books) and found countless other books. Through reading all those books, I began to start really learning about the world, way more than I’d learned through school, and through those stories, I began to learn about the power of courage, hope, friendship, and resilience, and I just found the prospect of the power of storytelling absolutely amazing.

Now, as a kid, I’d always had this idea for a certain book called Enchantria. It involved a dark, evil kingdom and guardians who had to defend a different kingdom – the kingdom of Enchantria – from those dark forces. And so, that summer, when I was ten years old and super bored, I decided, “Why not? I read so many books, writing is gonna be a breeze!” So I sat down, and I still remember how I looked my dad in the eye and said, “I’m gonna write a book.” I don’t quite remember what his reaction was or if he thought I could pull it off, but to this day, I can really, really clearly remember me saying that.

Little did I know that that first prologue I wrote was going to turn into a first draft, which would turn into a book one, which would turn into a whole series!

But even then, I still didn’t really take writing seriously. It was… a difficult journey. There have been a lot of ups and downs, even before I started to publish. I always got writer’s block, and I never really thought about what I’d do once this series was finished. Go back to my ordinary life?

Well… that didn’t quite happen.

In February of 2024, I finished the first draft of book two in the Enchantria series, and I published it (yes, I naively thought that my first drafts were BRILLIANT and I didn’t require revisions) under a different pen name, and I got started on book three. And it was also in February of 2024 that my dad also bought me a craft book on writing that i’d been wanting for a really long time – Writing Magic by Gail Carson Levine.

It arrived one afternoon in a surprisingly light package (it wasn’t as big of a book as I thought it was going to be), and I just curled up on my bed and started reading it. And it had me hooked. The way Gail Carson Levine spoke about writing made it sound fun. It showed me how amazing writing could be, how much creativity and freedom is involved in it! It was then that I realized that this was exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a writer.

Now, since that day, a floodgate of ideas has opened up, and it’s been both amazing and also super hard. I got deeper into the publishing process, and it was there that doubts and fears started to get to me. Suddenly it seemed like there were so many rules on writing! Suddenly it seemed like I wasn’t good enough. Suddenly, I had bad reviews, internet trolls, and had my books pirated.

And it was… scary.

So many times I’ve wanted to give up. So many times I’d tried to hold on to my dreams and hopes of one day becoming a successful writer.

Honestly? I’m still working to figure this journey out. 🙂 But no matter what, I know I can count on you guys for support! And I shall definitely try not to quit halfway through the journey. ;D

Resources

A ton of people ask me for resources on writing, and so here’s a list of all the writing resources that have helped me survive the two years of chaos of being a writer. ;D

Books (yes, all/mostly suitable for young writers):