Kamilla Benko

Kamilla Benko is the author of The Unicorn Quest trilogy and its upcoming successor, The Unicorn Academy. She has a website about her that you can find here.

Biography
Kamilla Benko was born in California and was raised in Indiana. She enrolled in St. Luke Catholic Elementary School and Bishop Chatard High School before attending Indiana University to study journalism and history. In 2012, she graduated summa cum lade from Indiana Univeristy and moved to New York City to pursue her childhood dream of becoming a children’s book editor.

Kamilla has edited books for all of the “Big Five” publishing houses. Her first job was at HarperCollins, where she assisted on properties like Pinkalicious, Pete the Cat, Fancy Nancy, and I Can Read! books. Following her time at HarperCollins, she went to Glasstown Entertainment, a literary packaging and film production company. There, she developed several critically acclaimed novels, and worked with many bestselling authors, including Eleanor Herman, Sarah Holland, Zoraida Córdova, and Tara Sim. (To learn more about literary packaging, read this Bustle interview.) Eventually, Kamilla became a senior editor and brand manager at Bloomsbury Publishing before turning to writing full time.

In 2015, inspired by the talented authors she worked with, Kamilla began to write about a pair of sisters in a land of unicorns. Three years later, Bloomsbury published Kamilla’s debut novel, The Unicorn Quest, the first book in a middle grade fantasy series. The Unicorn Quest: Secret in the Stone (2019) and The Unicorn Quest: Fire in the Star (2020) followed thereafter. In 2019, Kamilla collaborated with the directors and filmmakers of Disney’s Frozen II to write Frozen II: Forest of Shadows, an original “midquel” novel that reveals Anna and Elsa’s adventures between the smash hit movies.

Trivia

 * In an interview, Kamilla Benko said that she wished she was a Gemmer, but she knows in her heart that she's a storytelling Spinner.
 * She used to get in trouble for hiding books under her desk during class.