Adam Silvera

About Adam Silvera

Adam Silvera was born on June 7, 1990, and grew up in the South Bronx in New York City. He did not follow a traditional college path; instead, he built his knowledge of publishing from the inside—working in the café and then on the sales floor at Barnes & Noble, then as a bookseller at Books of Wonder, and as a reviewer for Shelf Awareness. He also took writing courses at the Gotham Writers Workshop. Silvera has described this as building his own informal MFA.

He began writing as a child, producing fan fiction for Harry Potter and Marvel franchises starting around age eleven. He has been open about his identity as a gay Puerto Rican man and about his experiences with depression and borderline personality disorder. His early encounters with queer representation in fiction—particularly Cassandra Clare's The Mortal Instruments series—shaped his commitment to centering queer protagonists in his own work.

Debut and Early Novels

Silvera's debut, More Happy Than Not (2015, Soho Teen), follows a teenage boy in the Bronx who considers a memory-erasure procedure to suppress his emerging queer identity. The novel became a New York Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award. His second novel, History Is All You Left Me (2017), examines grief and obsessive memory through the story of a teenager processing his ex-boyfriend's death.

They Both Die at the End

They Both Die at the End (2017, HarperTeen) is set in a world where a company called Death-Cast notifies people on the day they will die. Two strangers—Mateo and Rufus—connect through an app for the dying and spend their last day together. The novel was optioned for television multiple times (including by HBO in 2019) and experienced an extraordinary second wave of popularity beginning in 2020 when readers on TikTok's BookTok community began recommending it widely. It became the bestselling YA novel of 2021 and spent nearly a year on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list after the release of its prequel, The First to Die at the End (2022).

Book Bans and Ongoing Work

Silvera's books have been targeted in book ban efforts across the United States. More Happy Than Not was removed from multiple Florida school districts during 2022–23 and listed in PEN America's Index of School Book Bans. Several of his other titles have been challenged in Iowa, Tennessee, Texas, and Florida districts. Silvera has described writing queer characters as central to his creative practice, noting that he does not feel compelled to contribute to what he calls an already extensive body of heterosexual narratives. His Death-Cast series continues with The Survivor Wants to Die at the End (2025) and a forthcoming installment announced for 2026.