Debut author Tigest Girma is good at keeping secrets. After all, it’s how she started her writing career, quietly typing dystopian stories influenced by Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games and Veronica Roth’s Divergent on Wattpad during her teenage years. Following her and her family’s move from their hometown of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Melbourne, Australia, for her father’s job, Girma says she found that books were “the only place I could be equal to” her peers. She was immediately drawn to paranormal romance, a subgenre she hadn’t had much access to in Ethiopia. “I immersed myself in these weird monster girl stories that helped me cope with transitioning so dramatically from an African country to the Western world. I think that’s where my love of vampires and this escaping into a dark world came from.”
After she’d read every paranormal romance in her high school’s library, Girma realized that she could just write her own. Her dreams of becoming a writer were born in those private hours spent spinning tales online to no one’s knowledge. But she also recognized that the path to becoming an author would likely be a challenging one. Seeing so few Black writers, and even fewer Ethiopian writers, Girma chose to work as a teacher, a role “that would sustain my writing,” she says. “I needed an actual job until this dream could come true at one point.”
Girma wrote three different manuscripts—all fantasies, the last two contemporary tales set in Ethiopia—before landing on the idea of vampires. She was inspired by the release of Black Panther, a film that “blew my mind” and “shamed me a little,” she says. Seeing a cast full of Black characters, Girma decided she wanted all her characters to be Black and injected her African culture into her stories. As Girma saw the rise of authors such as Tomi Adeyemi, she didn’t lose hope: “There’s room for us. I would just keep saying to myself, Try again. Don’t change the story you’re doing.”
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