Hafsah Faizal Books in Order

Hafsah Faizal was born in Miami, Florida, and raised in Los Angeles, California. She is a novelist, designer, and the founder of IceyDesigns, a web design studio she started as a teenager. Her path into books did not begin in a writing program or a publishing office. It began online, with curiosity, persistence, and a lot of self-teaching.

She has said she was not a big reader as a child. That changed around seventeen, when she fell hard for young adult fiction, started book blogging, and began making up for lost time by reading constantly. Once she realized the people writing those books were real people with real jobs, she decided she could try it too.

Design was growing beside writing the whole time. Faizal taught herself design and code when she was young, then launched IceyDesigns at seventeen. What started as tinkering with her own blog grew into work for other people in the book world. She has also said she does not have a writing degree, and that belief in learning by doing runs through a lot of her story.

Fantasy turned out to be the right home.

Before publication, Faizal wrote several manuscripts and learned from each one. She has said that We Hunt the Flame was her fifth manuscript, and that she worked on it for more than four years before querying agents. That long stretch paid off. The novel sold and arrived in 2019 as her debut, giving readers a big, atmospheric fantasy with a world inspired by ancient Arabia.

In We Hunt the Flame and We Free the Stars, she builds Arawiya and follows Zafira and Nasir through cursed forests, political danger, hidden magic, and a love story that has to fight for space inside a much larger conflict. Readers who connect with these books often talk about the setting first, and for good reason. Faizal has described herself as a very visual writer, and it shows in the way she handles architecture, clothing, weapons, weather, and mood. But the real pull is emotional. Her characters are usually torn between duty and desire, survival and kindness, power and the cost of taking it.

Then she gave herself permission to get bloodier.

With A Tempest of Tea, Faizal moved from desert quest fantasy into a city of vampires, secrets, and class tension. The book follows Arthie Casimir, who runs an elegant tearoom by day and an illegal bloodhouse by night, and it blends found family, romance, revenge, and a heist plot with sharp political pressure underneath. A Steeping of Blood pushes that story further, while The Wishless Ones shows another side of her range, a darker origin story focused on a young Jafar and his brother Rohan.

Across her work, certain things keep coming back. Faizal likes characters with secrets, people who are more dangerous than they first appear, and worlds shaped by history, power, and survival. Even when the books are full of magic or vampires, the emotional questions stay close to the bone. Who can you trust. What do you owe your family. What part of yourself can you keep when the world wants a different version of you.

She has also been recognized for her work outside fiction, including a place on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2021. These days she lives in North Carolina with her husband, still balancing writing with design. It seems to suit her. One half builds the look of a world. The other half sets it on fire.