Kia Abdullah is bestselling author and travel writer. Her novels include Take It Back (a Guardian and Telegraph thriller of the year), Truth Be Told (shortlisted for a Diverse Book Award), Next of Kin (longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award) and Those People Next Door (a Times Bestseller and Waterstones Thriller of the Month). Her new novel, What Happens in the Dark, is out in June 2025.
Kia has won a Diverse Book Award (2022) and a JB Priestley Award for Writers of Promise (2020), and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Times, The Telegraph and the BBC. She is also the founder of Asian Booklist, a nonprofit that advocates for diversity in publishing.
Kia was born in Tower Hamlets in East London and was raised in a family of eight children. As the most stubborn of six daughters, she constantly found herself in trouble for making choices that clashed with her parents’, a habit they came to accept when she became their first and only child to graduate from university – with a first in Computer Science.
In 2007, Kia left her job in tech to pursue the one thing she had always wanted: a career as a writer, taking a 50% pay cut in the process. She worked as sub-editor and later features editor at Asian Woman Magazine where she interviewed British-Asian luminaries including Riz Ahmed, Meera Syal, Nitin Sawnhey and Anoushka Shankar.
Kia went on to join global publisher Penguin Random House where she helped grow digital readership at Rough Guides to over a million users per month. In 2014, she quit her day job to found Atlas & Boots, an outdoor travel blog now read by 150,000 people a month.
Today, she spends her time writing, boxing, mentoring adults in Newham and visiting far-flung destinations for Atlas & Boots.
Kia loves to travel, hates to cook and periodically highlights that, in actual fact, she is one of nine children (one passed away), making her number Seven of Nine… which is cool but only if you’re a Star Trek fan… which she is. But please don’t hold it against her. Have a look around, say hi on Twitter and Instagram and if you’re feeling really nice buy her new novel.