Tahereh Mafi

Born to immigrant parents from Iran, Tahereh Mafi grew up in a small town in Connecticut. Mafi, her parents, and four older brothers later moved to California, where Mafi attended high school and graduated from Soka University of America. In 2011, Mafi published her first novel Shatter Me, a young adult dystopian romantic thriller and the first of seven novels in the Shatter Me series. Published in 2018, A Very Large Expanse of Sea is a standalone contemporary novel, for which Mafi was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Mafi currently lives in California with her husband, writer and filmmaker Ransom Riggs, and their daughter Layla.