HarperCollins has acquired singer-songwriter and actor Kiera Azar’s debut YA fantasy novel Thorn Season in a multi-publisher auction. Kristin Rens, executive editor at HarperCollins US, bought rights from Pete Knapp at Park and Fine on behalf of Claire Wilson at RCW. Tom Bonnick, editorial director at Harper Fire, bought U.K. and Commonwealth rights excluding Canada from Claire Wilson. Translation rights have been sold in nine additional territories including Brazil, France, and Germany.

The first in a trilogy, Thorn Season finds Alissa Paine, heiress of a line of Hunters, in a conundrum. Alissa is part of a family that hunts Wielders, but Alissa is secretly a Wielder herself, doing everything she can to hide her abilities. When Alissa receives an invitation to debut in the royal court, she’s willing to do anything to keep her secret hidden, while charming her suitors, but soon realizes that finding love could be a deadly game.

“Fantasy has always had my heart,” Azar told PW. “The stories that we consume as people on the cusp of young adulthood are the stories that really imprint on us and cement themselves inside us.”

Azar grew up on a steady diet of YA fantasies, especially those written by Leigh Bardugo, Marissa Meyer, and Laini Taylor. As fate would have it, Azar made an appearance in the Netflix adaptation of Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone, an experience that pushed her to keep her writing.

“Stepping into a fully fleshed world that had been based off a successful fantasy book was really something special as a new writer,” Azar said. “It was so encouraging and inspirational just to see what could be created from a book.”

Post-graduation, Azar had decided she wanted to take writing seriously, and wrote the first manuscript of Thorn Season over the course of a year.

Azar recalled her first experiences trying to get her concept down. “The story in your mind is so polished and perfect, and then you go to put it on paper, and suddenly it’s messy and anticlimactic and it’s so daunting. But I just fell in love with [the craft of] writing and I wanted to keep trying.”

Azar “really went in blind” when it came to her next steps, as she knew “nothing about how to even begin publishing.” After doing research on how to query, Azar drafted blurbs and a list of dream agents. At the top of that list was Claire Wilson, who after signing Azar as a client, brought Pete Knapp to co-agent the book in the U.S. market.

“​Her writing is pacey, but also so gorgeous and lyrical; the world is so lush and fully realized and the magic is visceral and singular,” Knapp said on what drew him to Azar’s work. “Kiera is so excellent at cutting straight to the emotional truth of a scene, and the result is a read that sticks with you long after you’ve put it down.”

Knapp and Wilson took the book to publishers this past March, just before the start of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. The first-round offers came in on the first day of the fair, Knapp reported, “and we had a deal done before the fair ended later that week.”

“I felt incredibly grateful and so overwhelmed with the whirlwind response,” Azar said. “It really was like a dream.”

Thorn Season arrives right at the height of romantasy fever, and though Azar knew the genre was trending, she was only interested in “trying to zonein on what I wanted to write and just make what I wanted to write as authentic as it could be.” But seeing other romantasy titles flying off the shelves, she was “encouraged to think that maybe there could be an audience out there for my story as well.”


Thorn Season will hit shelves next fall, with books two and three of the series expected in 2026 and 2027, respectively.