Set in post-apocalyptic Chicago, the series follows 16-year-old Beatrice “Tris” Prior, who lives in a society where people are split among five different clear-cut personality factions. I didn't use an outline or plan, and now I'm a pretty strict outliner, she recalls with a laugh. “My approach is just a lot more methodical and organized, I think, than it used to be.” All of that internal back-and-forth paid off: She sold her debut novel, eventually titled Divergent, and then the rest of the trilogy her first book was published in 2011 within a year of graduation.

“I didn’t use an outline or plan, and now I’m a pretty strict outliner,” she recalls with a laugh. It took Roth nearly four years to flesh out the idea and put pen to paper, which she finally did as a college senior, having transferred to Northwestern University.

“I thought to myself, ‘What if we could use some kind of technology to facilitate this?’”Īt the time, her interest in how technology could help or hurt a person’s psychology-and what it meant to face those fears-was a vague notion. “We were learning about exposure therapy, which is a method of treating anxiety and phobias where you get repeatedly exposed to whatever stimulus provokes your fear response until your brain gets used to it,” she tells. It wasn’t until a freshman psychology class at Carleton College that Roth got an initial inkling of writerly inspiration. During her upbringing in the outer Chicago suburb of Barrington, Illinois, she didn’t even explicitly articulate a desire to become an author, though artistic pursuits run in the family her mother, Barbara Ross, is a painter. Roth never set out to create a best-selling YA series.

But does every author from that era want to revisit the series that made them famous? For Veronica Roth, the brain (and fingertips) behind the massive Divergent franchise and author of Poster Girl, published on October 18, looking back is far more complicated.

A sequel series to the popular 2000s Maze Runner books also kicks off this fall - and the list goes on. Hunger Games creator Suzanne Collins released a prequel to her bestselling series at the start of the pandemic, while Stephanie Meyer published a companion novel to her smash-hit Twilight around the same time. When it comes to the current wave of American aughts nostalgia, the authors of dystopian and paranormal young adult fiction are seizing the moment.

Divergent by Veronica Roth