An Downer was born in Arlington, Virginia in 1960 and grew up in Manila and Bangkok and recalls avidly reading fantasy fiction.

Her first published work was a trilogy published in the late 1980s and early 1990s (The Spellkey, The Glass Salamander, and The Books of the Keepers), collected in a revised edition in 1995 as The Spellkey Trilogy. A second series for middle-grade readers, begun in 2003 with the novel Hatching Magic, continues with The Dragon of Never-Was (2006). The Spellkey series is high fantasy, taking place wholly in an invented world and chronicling a good-versus-evil story of two foundlings, a stableboy and an ostracized seer. Hatching Magic and its sequel, The Dragon of Never-Was, are contemporary fantasies with elements of time travel. The series follows a young girl, Theodora Oglethorpe, as she discovers a world of wizardry and magic. While Downer’s books are frequently compared to the work of Patricia A. McKillip and Diana Wynne Jones,[ she has cited the influence of Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea books and the Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander in shaping her outlook and prose style.

Spellkey series

• The Spellkey (1987), jacket by Caldecott-medal winner David Wiesner, also a UK paperback edition from Futura/Macmillan.
• The Glass Salamander (1989), jacket by Caldecott-medal winner David Wiesner
• The Books of the Keepers (1993)

All three books were collected into a paperback omnibus edition, The Spellkey Trilogy, published by Baen Books in 1995.

Hatching Magic series U.S. edition jackets by Omar Rayyan

• Hatching Magic (2003; Scholastic Book Club selection; translated into German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Thai, and Spanish; additional languages pending)
• The Dragon of Never-Was (2006)

Other Fiction

• “Somnus’s Fair Maid” (short-listed for the James Tiptree Jr. prize), a Regency retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, in Black Thorn, White Rose, edited by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow
• Short stories and poetry in Gargoyle Magazine in the late 1980s, including excerpts from an unpublished novel.
• “Bread-and-Butterflies” in Alice Redux (2006), a collection of short fiction inspired by Lewis Carroll and edited by Richard Peabody.