Casey McQuiston

Casey McQuiston is an American author best known for their debut novel, Red, White & Royal Blue (2019). The wildly successful young-adult romantic comedy, which was also adapted into a 2023 hit movie of the same name, follows the bi son of the first female American president and his entanglement with the prince who is heir to the British throne.

McQuiston, who identifies as non-binary, was raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana with their siblings and grew up attending conservative evangelical schools. An avid reader from a young age, McQuiston tried to emulate their older teenage sister by reading the same books, which meant reading classics from authors like Dorothy Parker and Jane Austen many years before most students.

After graduating from Louisiana State University with a degree in journalism, McQuiston briefly moved to Colorado and waited tables while working as a freelance food writer for magazines.

Around 2016, McQuiston, who’d always wanted to be a novelist, took the plunge and began writing. Drawing inspiration from the 2016 US presidential election, biographies on Hillary Clinton and the British Royal Family shows like Veep (2012–2019), and the tropes of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), the idea for Red, White, and Royal Blue was born. However, the story came with an important twist, as discussed in an interview with archive.org:

I write queer fiction for the same reason straight people write straight fiction: because I’m a queer person, and that’s the world I live in and the experiences I draw from and relate to. With this book —and with my future books— my vision was to write a fun, escapist, trope-y, smart rom-com good enough to help push queer love out of the margins and into the rom-com mainstream. So, in that way, I always knew this would be a queer book.

And McQuiston has held to this ideal, writing several subsequent queer-themed novels. One Last Stop (2021) is a time-travel rom-com with a bi detective at the center of the mystery and love story. I Kissed Shara Wheeler (2022) is a Paper Towns-esque story of disappearance after a queer kiss. And The Pairing (2024) follows friends and ex-lovers stuck together on a European tour who wager on who can bed their hunky Italian guide. McQuiston describes the tale as “super bisexual and there’s a lot of travel and food”.

McQuiston’s work has earned a spot on the New York Times Best-Seller List, along with a GoodReads Choice Award, a RUSA Award, and an Emmy nomination.

McQuiston has been openly bi for many years. In a 2019 interview with Refinery29, McQuiston said:

I’m bisexual. I rarely have gotten to see good representation of that. So I was like, well fuck it, I’ll write it.

McQuiston has also been open about their ADHD and how it affects their writing and creative process.