Docklands critics have long called Melbourne’s port turned waterside suburb soulless. But for Tigest Girma it’s where her seductive ideas about vampires, university drama and Ethiopian mythology percolate.
When characters for Girma’s bestselling fantasy books aren’t “doing what I want them to do” she comes down to the water for a break and imagines the scene from their perspective. “The calming water can spark ideas for me sometimes when I’m really stuck,” she says as we begin our late-afternoon stroll.
We meet on a temperamental spring day at the Library at the Dock, overlooking the water glistening in the sun. Towards the city skyline, looming grey clouds appear to be picking up pace. “I swear it is about to rain,” Girma says.
Her conversational tone is breezy and laid-back. During our walk together along the Victoria Harbour promenade she is not recognised once but the gen Z upstart has achieved something many other authors spend their lives chasing. Before her 27th birthday, she was a New York Times bestselling author.
She has spent the day working on the third novel in her trilogy in the lead-up to the release of the sequel, Eternal Ruin, next week. Her first novel, Immortal Dark, debuted at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for young adult hardcover. It tells the story of an orphaned heiress searching for her abducted sister at Uxlay University, alongside vampires of African origin who feed on specific human bloodlines. It’s a fantasy world with east African mythology woven in.
There is a lightness to the 27-year-old which seems at odds with the darkness and danger in her books. She laughs easily and smiles widely.
Girma has ventured to the city from Deer Park, in Melbourne’s west. It’s been home since her family migrated from Ethiopia when she was 13 and she found herself thrust into the western world. Beginning high school in Australia was “terrifying” and nothing like the US TV shows and movies – Hannah Montana and iCarly – that she watched in Addis Ababa. There were no American-style proms. No classic “mean girl”.
“I had to learn everything,” she says.
Girma never thought of herself as a black girl until she started school in Melbourne. “I will never forget the first day of school when you just walk in and everyone’s turning around and you’re looking instantly for someone that looks like you,” she says. “No one’s there. I was like, ‘Oh, this is gonna be my reality now.’” She was asked questions about her home country like “did you ride a lion to school?” –
“I had to always defend my country,” she recalls. “It was an unfair thing to put on a young girl.
“They would only think of us a really poor, poverty-ridden country. That was not my reality.”
Being othered in this way made her feel that being ordinary was not an option for her. It drove her to “perform better”.
To try to make sense of her new life, she began devouring novels in her school library. Inside the pages of paranormal romance novels like the Twilight and Vampire Academy series she discovered dramatic plots that felt relatable.
“I was like, this is safe, I feel safe here,” she says. “It was a way for me to navigate and be more courageous and braver in the world. I was finding my confidence through those fantasy books.”
As the wind stirs at our ankles, we reach Marvel Stadium at the end of the promenade. We decide to turn back and find a seat to seek shelter. Girma explains that a longing for her home country has played a role in her creating an entirely black cast for her fantasy trilogy. “I was really seeking that home away from home,” she says.
She gestures at a bench for us to sit under a corridor of pepper trees. I ask about her childhood. She grew up as the middle child with two brothers. When they were playing PlayStation and she couldn’t watch her “silly American” shows, she would read books from the family’s collection. Mostly Ethiopian authors – animal fables that taught morals – and translations of classics including Cinderella.
When she began reading fantasy and paranormal romance books later on, Girma didn’t notice the absence of black characters. So much so that when she began penning her own novels as a teenager she wrote white characters, replicating what she knew. “I just could not even conceive of us [in that fantasy world],” she says.
In her early 20s Girma began noticing a cultural shift. Audiences appeared to be craving better representation of diversity on screen and in books. The 2018 sci-fi film Black Panther, set in a fictional African country, was a global box-office success. Girma says seeing a black girl on the cover of the young adult fantasy book Children of Blood and Bone by the Nigerian American author Tomi Adeyemi “blew my mind”.
“These moments were coming together and I was noticing how much we were missing from the fantasy field,” she says.
Her first novel was “whitewashed” but she never sent it to publishers. The second and third – both set in Ethiopia with black characters – were rejected. But she persevered, unable to let go of the thought that she could write black fantasy characters and make “it as great as I can”.
The idea for Immortal Dark came in the depths of Melbourne’s lengthy Covid lockdowns. It was April 2021. Girma was rewatching Twilight with her older brother, a fellow fantasy lover.
She typed a one-line concept into her phone notes: What if vampires originated in Africa?
Days later, she tweeted a teaser – “college dark academia with black vampires”. “I was like – ‘Hey, do you want black vampires?’ And they were like – ‘Yeah, we want.’
“I want it to be … where [black people] are desired, wanted, and we get the handsome guy, and we sort of live our best lives.
“Now I have it in my fantasy books where it’s a safe place for all black girls.”
Inklings of doubt from the former agent rejections lingered. But the reaction to the tweet, which she says attracted about 200 likes, changed her life.
Girma envisioned her story as a trilogy – the types of fantasy book series she loved reading. “I hate the idea of loving a character and saying goodbye to them too quickly, so I wanted to stay with them for as long as I could,” she says.
She adds: “Sometimes you have to take a complete stab in the dark when no one’s thinking of the idea. Sometimes it really works out and it makes magical things happen.”
When she first heard Immortal Dark had reached the bestseller list, she assumed it was a mistake. “I was like, ‘Huh, we did do it.’ Like, we proved something here.
“There is a need, and there’s a demand for black fantasy books, and they can do really well and be loved by non-black readers as well,” she says, her hands splaying out to emphasis the point.
“It was just like confirming something deep inside of me.”
When I ask about overcoming the doubts about creating a series featuring black vampires, she replies: “The doubt never left.”
She adds: “I could talk about doubt for like an hour.” She crosses her arms and leans forward.
“Especially as a black woman – a black author – that doubt is never going to leave you.”
As Girma began writing the third novel in the trilogy, she encountered doubt again “on my shoulder, screaming at me that you can’t do this again. Even though there are records that say I have done this twice. It made me realise doubt doesn’t care what you have done before.”
It’s something she’s learned to be comfortable with by finding out it’s OK to fail – to do so quickly, learn from it and not seek external validation.
“If you’re always looking outside, it’s never going to be inside of you. You’re not going to be able to manifest it within yourself.”
Eternal Ruin by Tigest Girma is out on 28 October through Hachette
