“Here's one of the things I learned that morning: if you cross a line and nothing happens, the line loses meaning. It's like that old riddle about a tree falling in a forest, and whether it makes a sound if there's no one around to hear it. You keep drawing a line farther and farther away, crossing it every time. That's how people end up stepping off the edge of the earth.”

American author, young adult and middle-grade fiction

Lauren Oliver is an American author of young adult and middle-grade fiction. She is known for novels including Before I Fall, Panic, and the Delirium trilogy, and for the range of her work across several age groups. Before I Fall was adapted into a major motion picture in 2017, and Panic was later developed as a series by Amazon Studios, where Oliver served as creator, writer, and showrunner. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages, and she was a 2012 nominee for the E. B. White Read Aloud Award for Liesl & Po. She also wrote the middle-grade fantasy novel The Spindlers.