Casey McQuiston (they/them) is an American author perhaps best known for their debut novel, Red, White & Royal Blue. The young adult romantic-comedy, focusing on Alex, a bi son of the first female American president and his entanglement with Prince Henry, heir to the British throne, was a smash hit that was also adapted into a 2023 Amazon Prime hit movie of the same name.
McQuiston was raised with their siblings while attending a conservative evangelical school in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Their childhood was marked by a fervent love of reading. Scholastic Book Fairs were a portal to joy for McQuiston, who tried to emulate their teenage older sister by reading what they read, resulting in them reading classics at an early age from authors like Dorothy Parker and Jane Austen.
After graduating from Louisiana State University with a degree in journalism, McQuiston briefly moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, and began waiting tables and working in magazine publishing (though to hear them tell it, that position was more about being a freelancer who wrote articles about good recipe collections and where to find the best local brunch spots.)
Around 2016 and after a particularly difficult break-up, after noodling around in a few craft hobbies for a time (such as lap loom weaving) , McQuiston decided it was finally time to take a crack at writing a novel like they had always wanted to do. Inspired by multiple sources, including the events of the 2016 election, reading biographies on Hillary Clinton and the British Royal Family, and consuming media like Veep while adoring the tropes of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, 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 been true to this statement by centering queerness in the narrative of most of their follow-up works: One Last Stop is a time-travel rom-com with a bi detective at the center of the mystery and love story; and I Kissed Shara Wheeler, a Paper Towns-esque story of disappearance after a queer kiss. Their next upcoming novel out in August 2024, The Pairing, follows friends and ex-lovers as they are stuck together on a European tour and both bet on who can bed their hunky Italian tour guide while also perhaps being tempted to rekindle their own past romance. McQuiston describes the tale as “super bisexual and there’s a lot of travel and food”.
McQuiston is also open about their diagnosis of ADHD and how it affects their writing method and organization.
Regarding their bisexuality, McQuiston has been open about their orientation for many years. From an interview with Refinery29:
“I'm bisexual. I rarely have gotten to see good representation of that. So I was like, well fuck it, I'll write it.”