Riggs, Ransom (1979-…), is an American author best known for his “Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children” series of novels for young adults. Riggs’s books were partly inspired by the author’s fascination with old snapshots. The stories are a mixture of fantasy and time travel, distinctively combining text and photographs to produce a haunted, eerie quality. The series began with Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2011), and continued with Hollow City (2014), Library of Souls (2015), A Map of Days (2018), The Conference of the Birds (2020), and The Desolations of Devil’s Acre (2021). Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was adapted into a 2016 motion picture of the same name by the American director Tim Burton.
The narrator of the books is Jacob Portman, a 16-year-old boy living in Florida. After Jacob’s grandfather is murdered, the boy follows a series of clues to an abandoned orphanage on a remote island in Wales. At the orphanage, supervised by Miss Peregrine, he meets “peculiar” children, such as Emma, who can control fire, and Millard, who is invisible. Jacob discovers he has special powers that make him the only person who can keep the children safe from monsters called “hollowgasts.” Hollow City picks up Jacob’s story immediately after the end of the first novel. Through time travel, he and his companions go to London in 1940, during World War II (1939-1945), to free Miss Peregrine from a spell that confines her to the form of a bird. Library of Souls begins immediately after the end of the second volume. Jacob and his friends go from danger to danger as they try to rescue their fellow peculiars, who have been captured by evil people called wights. In A Map of Days, the children and Miss Peregrine travel to the United States with Jacob, where they try to fit into modern-day life. In The Conference of the Birds, tensions arise between gangs of peculiars in the United States, which leads to a final showdown in The Desolations of Devil’s Acre.
Riggs has also written The Sherlock Holmes Handbook (2009) and two companion books to the “Miss Peregrine” series, Tales of the Peculiar (2016) and Miss Peregrine’s Museum of Wonders (2022). He has edited a collection of old photographs called Talking Pictures (2012).
Riggs was born in Maryland in 1979 but moved with his family to Florida at the age of about 5. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Kenyon College in 2001 and also received a master of fine arts degree from the University of Southern California film school. In 2013, he married Tahereh Mafi, an American author of fantasy romances for young adults.
