The Next J.K. Rowling Is...

Samantha Shannon.

Who?

From a piece on Jezebel...


The next J.K. Rowling has been discovered and she's not you with your fifteen hundred-page manuscript about a cat named Larry Cotter who finds out that he, a seemingly ordinary house cat, can play piano and so joins a community of feline jazz musicians that play in speakeasies throughout prohibition-era America — she's a 20-year-old Oxford student named Samantha Shannon and her first novel, The Bone Season, helped garner her a multi-book, seven-figure deal with Bloomsbury.

Considering that the real J.K. Rowling is still writing, it might be a little premature to start looking for the "new" Rowling. Still, Bloomsbury editor-in-chief Alexandra Pringle — whose name seems like that of a rough-draft Harry Potter character— was so impressed with Shannon's debut novel that she committed to an entire series based on the adventures of a 19-year-old clairvoyant named Paige, who escapes from a criminal underworld in the not-too-distant future only to be sent to the secret city of Oxford by the repressive future government. "The book," said Pringle, "is an utterly consuming adventure and we are committed to the seven." That's seven books, right from the get-go, coupled with lofty expectations to duplicate the success of a once-in-a-generation phenomenon. But hey, no pressure or anything.