Anna Mia Hansen knows she’s been lucky. She’s managed to get away with spending most of her life pondering dragons, elves, magical heirlooms, and Viking warriors. As a young girl, she was introduced to the stories of Scandinavia by her father, a Dane who loved fairy tales, and her first literary love was Hans Christian Anderson’s ‘The Little Mermaid’. As a teenager, she loved books so much, she sometimes shirked parties so she could find out the ending to the novel she was reading. It’s no wonder, then, that Anna eventually took a degree in English literature (after a brief foray into Computer Science, which we won’t discuss). She completed a PhD in medieval literature at the University of Sydney in Australia, majoring in Old Norse. After teaching literature to university students for over a decade, Anna left academia to start a family. She is now a freelance writer and amateur photographer.