We Free the Stars

Hafsah Faizal is an American author of young adult novels, best known for her New York Times best-selling fantasy novel We Hunt the Flame.

Faizal was born in Florida and grew up in California. She is an American Muslim of Sri Lankan and Arab descent. Her parents are both Muslim Sri Lankan immigrants. Faizal is the oldest of four children and has two sisters, Asma and Azraa.

Faizal wrote her first novel at age seventeen. Aside from writing, she also has been running a book blog called IceyBooks since September 2010. Faizal says that her background in design influences her writing to the degree that she considers to be a very visual writer.

Faizal self-published her first book under the pen name Hafsah Laziaf in October 2013. It was a young adult science fiction novel called Unbreathable, set in a distant future where Earth was destroyed and humanity settled on a new planet devastated by food shortages and oxygen scarcity.

Faizal wrote four other manuscripts before starting the first draft of We Hunt the Flame, which would be her first traditionally published novel. She found her literary agent through the Twitter book pitch contest #DVPit, finishing up the first draft of what would ultimately become We Hunt the Flame just before the contest started.