Tahereh Mafi

About Tahereh Mafi

Tahereh Mafi was born on November 9, 1988, in Connecticut, to Iranian immigrant parents. She grew up in a tight-knit Iranian-American community and identifies as Muslim. She studied at Soka University in Aliso Viejo, California. She is married to fellow YA author Ransom Riggs, best known for the Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children series. The couple collaborated on the crossover novel Whichwood (2017) and the related middle grade novel This Woven Kingdom (2022). She and her family divide their time between the United States and other countries.

Mafi's debut novel, Shatter Me, was published by HarperCollins in 2011. The book introduced Juliette Ferrars, a seventeen-year-old whose touch is lethal to anyone she makes contact with, who has been kept in isolation and is now recruited by a dystopian regime. The novel's prose style—fragmented, lyrical, and heavily annotated with crossed-out text representing Juliette's internal self-editing—won immediate critical attention. The series has expanded to nine novels and a companion novella series, with the final volumes published in 2021 and 2022. Total series sales exceeded five million copies.

Her Most Challenged Works

Books in the Shatter Me series have been challenged in school libraries for sexual content, including explicit romantic and intimate scenes in the later volumes. Titles most frequently cited in challenge reports include Shatter Me, Unravel Me, and Ignite Me. Some challenges have also referenced the series' dystopian violence and its portrayal of authoritarian government. Supporters of the books note that the series is marketed to readers aged fourteen and older and that the romance reflects the emotional intensity typical of the genre.

Other Works

Outside of Shatter Me, Mafi has published the middle grade fantasy series This Woven Kingdom (2022–2023), set in an alternate world drawing on Persian mythology and culture. She has spoken frequently about the importance of seeing Iranian and Muslim characters—not as villains or victims, but as protagonists with full interior lives—in American young adult fiction.