Lili Khachatryan Buckley was born in Armenia, where her earliest companions were books. She grew up immersed in Armenian and Russian classics, falling in love with the words of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gogol, as well as the ancient voices of Armenian historians and writers from Khorenatsi to Muratsan. At just a year and a half old, she slept clutching her favorite poetry book by Sylvia Kaputikyan—its pages torn from overuse, its verses memorized before she could fully speak. By the age of nine, her first poem appeared in Tsitsernak, a children’s magazine in the USSR. She studied at the Armenian Pedagogical University, earning dual degrees in Child Psychology and English Language, and later continued her education in the United States, where she received her Master’s in Psychology from Harvard University. Although passionate about writing since childhood, it was during her immersion in academic papers that she rediscovered her love for shaping ideas into language. That spark led to her first novel, an epic fantasy born of her devotion to history, myth, and the human heart. Her background in psychology profoundly shapes her fiction, endowing her characters with emotional depth and inner conflict that resonate throughout every page. Her debut fantasy series, The War of Nine Kings, blends sweeping epic stakes with intimate struggles of identity, loyalty, and love. At its heart is Waenia, a young woman raised to inherit a crown not her own, torn between duty and desire, legacy and selfhood. Today, Buckley lives in Florida with her husband and children. She is both a full-time mother and a full-time dreamer, weaving stories that carry the echoes of her heritage, her love of history, and her belief in the enduring power of words.