Debut author Tigest Girma is good at keeping secrets. After all, it’s how she started her writing career, quietly typing dystopian stories influenced by Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games and Veronica Roth’s Divergent on Wattpad during her teenage years. Following her and her family’s move from their hometown of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Melbourne, Australia, for her father’s job, Girma says she found that books were “the only place I could be equal to” her peers. She was immediately drawn to paranormal romance, a subgenre she hadn’t had much access to in Ethiopia. “I immersed myself in these weird monster girl stories that helped me cope with transitioning so dramatically from an African country to the Western world. I think that’s where my love of vampires and this escaping into a dark world came from.”
After she’d read every paranormal romance in her high school’s library, Girma realized that she could just write her own. Her dreams of becoming a writer were born in those private hours spent spinning tales online to no one’s knowledge. But she also recognized that the path to becoming an author would likely be a challenging one. Seeing so few Black writers, and even fewer Ethiopian writers, Girma chose to work as a teacher, a role “that would sustain my writing,” she says. “I needed an actual job until this dream could come true at one point.”
Girma wrote three different manuscripts—all fantasies, the last two contemporary tales set in Ethiopia—before landing on the idea of vampires. She was inspired by the release of Black Panther, a film that “blew my mind” and “shamed me a little,” she says. Seeing a cast full of Black characters, Girma decided she wanted all her characters to be Black and injected her African culture into her stories. As Girma saw the rise of authors such as Tomi Adeyemi, she didn’t lose hope: “There’s room for us. I would just keep saying to myself, Try again. Don’t change the story you’re doing.”
When the pandemic hit, Girma spent much of her time trying to find any source of comfort, including returning to the love of her adolescence: paranormal romance. Her next book idea, a Black vampire novel, came to her during a Vampire Diaries rewatch, and she began writing what would become Immortal Dark (Little, Brown).
“The story is quite twisted, and that’s probably a reflection of the world around me,” Girma says. “At the moment it was created, I was quite sad, and I used [writing] to cope with that.”
Girma’s paranormal romance centers on 19-year-old Kidan Adane, who is reeling from the disappearance of her sister June and believes the truth is hidden at Uxlay University, where vampires rule the school. There she encounters Susenyos, the vampire begrudgingly bound to Kidan’s family, and under the guise of attempting to earn her place at the university, searches for answers about her sister and grows closer to the vampire who both frightens and seduces her.
After seeing how TikTok had catapulted the careers of YA authors Alex Aster and Chloe Gong, Girma thought to herself, “I see you, and I will learn from you.” It was a lesson well learned, as her video pitching the concept of Immortal Dark went viral in 2022 and she recognized that the audience she had been looking for did exist. Little, Brown associate editor Ruqayyah Daud reached out to her agent, Paige Terlip at Andrea Brown Literary Agency, and following Daud’s three-day binge-read of the manuscript, things began moving quickly. “Within a week, there was a preempt auction offer,” Girma says. “I was in the parking lot of my teaching job, sobbing. I was like, ‘Oh my God, your life just changes with one email.’ ”
There’s no hiding Girma’s debut success story now: she’s earned starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus, and Immortal Dark hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, in a year when vampires have been all the rage. What she’s learned through her publishing process is that the criticism she once feared as a young writer isn’t the end of the world and that validation isn’t everything. Young Girma, who had been “comfortable in my secrets” and kept her writing to herself, would be proud to see herself as a published author today. She also says she is “learning more than anything, you can’t tie everything you have to a single project. You’re allowed to create as many as you can over all these years.”
And now that she’s got her foot through the publishing door, Girma is looking forward to trying her hand at new genres and age ranges in the future. “I’m an open book. I’m just excited to see whatever idea bubbles up first.”
