Sabaa Tahir

Sabaa Tahir is a Pakistani American author best known for An Ember in the Ashes, a young adult fantasy series set in a brutal, Rome-inspired empire, following an enslaved young woman and a soldier of the ruling class whose fates become entangled through resistance, rebellion, and forbidden connection. Tahir has cited her upbringing helping run her family's motel in the California desert, where she encountered a wide range of people passing through, as an influence on her interest in stories about survival and moral complexity under oppressive systems. The series, beginning with An Ember in the Ashes in 2015, expanded to four novels and became known for pairing high-stakes political worldbuilding with unusually intense emotional and physical stakes for its characters. Tahir also wrote All My Rage, a contemporary novel about two Pakistani American teenagers navigating family, addiction, and grief, which won both the National Book Award for Young People's Literature and the Michael L. Printz Award, demonstrating a range beyond fantasy world-building into deeply personal realist fiction. New readers to her fantasy work should start with An Ember in the Ashes. There is no film or television adaptation of the series to date. Tahir continues to write actively across both fantasy and contemporary young adult fiction.