Tahereh Mafi

Tahereh Mafi is an American author best known for Shatter Me, a young adult dystopian series narrated by Juliette Ferrars, a girl whose lethal touch has made her a weapon for a totalitarian regime, told in a distinctive, fragmented prose style full of crossed-out thoughts and heightened, poetic interiority that set it apart from other YA dystopias of its era. The series began as a trilogy but expanded into a longer run as Mafi kept following Juliette's story alongside a wide ensemble cast, several of whom got their own novella-length side stories.

Beyond Shatter Me, Mafi has written across several other categories, including the middle-grade Furthermore duology, adult fantasy with This Woman's Work and A Very Large Expanse of Sea, a National Book Award longlisted novel drawing on her own experience as an Iranian American Muslim teenager after 9/11. That range signals an author who moves deliberately between audiences and genres rather than staying inside one lane.

New readers to Shatter Me should start with the first book of the same name; Mafi's original trilogy plan grew into six main novels plus companion novellas, and the series is best read in publication order since it heavily rewards accumulated knowledge of its expanding cast and the reveals around Juliette's powers. She remains an active author across both YA and adult fiction.