Hanna Alkaf Books in Order

Hanna Alkaf is a Malaysian writer whose books for children and teens are deeply connected to the places, histories, folklore, and everyday family life of Malaysia. She has spent nearly all her life there, apart from six years studying and working in Chicago, and now lives near Kuala Lumpur with her husband and two children.

She earned a journalism degree from Northwestern University, then built a career around words in many forms. Her work has included profiles, investigative features, corporate reports, social media posts, and newsletters. Before novels, she worked as a freelance journalist and wrote for Malaysian magazines.

Writing has been part of the plan for a long time.

Alkaf wrote short stories before she turned to full-length fiction. Around age thirty, she set herself a bigger challenge: finish a novel from beginning to end. That decision led to The Weight of Our Sky, a young adult story set during the May 13, 1969 race riots in Kuala Lumpur.

Before that novel, she published Gila: A Journey Through Moods & Madness, a nonfiction book about mental illness in Malaysia. The book brings together personal accounts and practical context, showing an early interest in subjects that can be hard to discuss openly. That care carries into her fiction, where fear, grief, anxiety, and family pressure are treated as real parts of a character’s life rather than easy plot devices.

In The Weight of Our Sky, sixteen-year-old Melati is separated from her mother as violence spreads through the city, while she also struggles with obsessive thoughts and rituals. The novel won the Freeman Award for Young Adult and High School Literature. It was later adapted into a digital comic, bringing its story of survival, prejudice, and courage to another format.

Her later books move easily between age groups and genres. The Girl and the Ghost follows Suraya and the pelesit spirit she inherits from her grandmother, mixing a frightening supernatural bond with questions about friendship and control. Queen of the Tiles takes place at a competitive Scrabble tournament, where Najwa investigates the death of her best friend. In Hamra and the Jungle of Memories, a girl enters the Langkawi jungle during the pandemic and faces creatures from Malaysian legend. The Hysterical Girls of St. Bernadette’s brings horror and mystery to an all-girls school in Kuala Lumpur.

The settings matter. Her characters deal with school, siblings, parents, friendships, and private fears, but they do so in recognizably Malaysian worlds full of local food, language, history, and folklore.

Alkaf also contributes to and edits anthologies, and she co-created the middle-grade horror series Tales from Cabin 23. Across all these projects, she writes for young readers who want a strong story first, whether that means a mystery, a ghost tale, a jungle quest, or a hard day made even harder by history.