Veronica Roth is an American author best known for her Divergent series, a science fiction and coming-of-age story set in a post-apocalyptic Chicago. The first book in the series was published when she was only 22, and it was written over her senior year at Northwestern University.
After Googling “how to get published by a big publisher,” she sent her first draft to an agent to whom she had previously spoken. By the following April, she’d landed a three-book contract with HarperCollins, and had sold movie rights to the novel just before she graduated. The young adult series became a massive success, with the film trilogy generating more than $750 million at the box office.
Roth attended Northwestern University’s Creative Writing Program. In an interview with The Daily Northwestern about the speed with which she wrote Divergent, she said, “I felt like I just knew the beginning, middle, and end, and I was just recording what I had already thought. So I think that kind of accounts for the speed, which I have not been able to achieve at any other point in my writing life.”
Divergent was followed by Insurgent and Allegiant. The series features 16-year-old Beatrice “Tris” Prior, who is struggling to identify with any of the five factions citizens are assigned to when they reach her age. She lives secretly as someone who fits into more than one group (a “divergent”), and explores her identity and relationship with another character, Tobias, who is called “Four.” Roth also published Four: A Divergent Collection, a companion volume that tells the story of the trilogy from his perspective.
Roth ventured outside of the series to publish Carve the Mark, The Fates Divide, and a book of short stories, The End and Other Beginnings: Stories from the Future. In 2020, her first novel geared towards adults, Chosen Ones, was released. It levels up the theme of children pre-destined to save the world and follows a group of adults that have already done it – and are now dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder and life in the public eye.