Nafiza Azad Books in Order

Nafiza Azad was born in Lautoka, Fiji, and spent her first seventeen years on the island. She grew up on a farm in a multicultural country where Christmas, Diwali, and Eid all had a place in the calendar. She has described herself as an Indo-Fijian Muslim Canadian, an identity shaped by several cultures, languages, and homes.

Books were not always easy to come by. Her town had one library, and borrowers could take out only two books at a time, so Azad and her friends also made up stories for one another. That early hunger for stories stuck with her.

After moving to Canada with her family, Azad attended the University of British Columbia. She initially studied biology and planned to become a doctor. Reading Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson changed her sense of what might be possible for a Muslim woman writing fantasy, and she switched her major to English.

She later earned a master's degree in Children's Literature from the University of British Columbia. Her interest in names, identity, and the ways people are shaped by the worlds around them helped spark the idea for her first novel.

That book, The Candle and the Flame, arrived in 2019 and was a finalist for the William C. Morris Award. It follows Fatima in Noor, a Silk Road city where humans and djinn live side by side after terrible violence. Azad builds the story around magic, family, faith, political tension, and a city full of different languages and traditions.

Her later novels keep the magic but shift the setting. In The Wild Ones, girls who have survived cruelty find one another through a strange realm called the Between and use their powers to help others. Road of the Lost follows Croi, a girl raised to believe she is an ordinary brownie, as a summons pulls her into the Otherworld and toward the truth about herself.

Azad's fantasy often centers girls and women of color who are trying to claim space, protect the people they love, and decide who they want to be.

Alongside her fiction, Azad coedited Writing in Color, a collection of writing advice from authors of color. She has also spoken about loving the research behind fantasy worlds, especially the new possibilities that appear when real histories, folklore, and imagined places meet.

She lives in British Columbia, Canada, with her family. When she isn't writing, she has said she reads plenty of books, watches K-dramas, and dreams of living on mangoes and pineapple.