Ana Huang – Author Biography
Ana Huang is an American romance novelist whose Twisted and Kings of Sin series made her one of the defining authors of the BookTok era — a #1 New York Times bestseller whose steamy, slow-burn romances have sold millions of copies worldwide.
Early Life
Huang was born on March 7, 1991, in the United States, the daughter of Chinese immigrants. As a child, her mother encouraged her to write stories as a way to practice English as a second language, and writing became a lifelong hobby — she posted fiction on Wattpad and wrote her first novel at fifteen. She studied international relations in college, including a semester abroad in Shanghai, and later worked in press relations at a geopolitical consulting company.
Career
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Huang began writing and self-publishing romance novels and promoting them on TikTok. The Twisted series — Twisted Love (2021), Twisted Games (2021), Twisted Hate (2022), and Twisted Lies (2022) — went massively viral, earning billions of views under BookTok hashtags, and was republished by Bloom Books, an imprint of Sourcebooks, in 2022. She followed it with the Kings of Sin series, loosely structured around the seven deadly sins, beginning with King of Wrath (2022); King of Greed and King of Sloth both reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, and Twisted Love spent 61 weeks on the paperback trade fiction list. In 2024 she was the fourth-highest-selling BookTok author with nearly 1.5 million print copies sold that year. Netflix optioned the Twisted series for television in a seven-figure deal.
Major Works
Beyond the Twisted and Kings of Sin books, Huang wrote the If Love series (If We Ever Meet Again, If the Sun Never Sets, If Love Had a Price, If We Were Perfect, all 2020) and launched the Gods of the Game sports-romance series with The Striker (2024) and The Defender (2025). Her work has been translated into more than two dozen languages and featured in outlets including NPR, Cosmopolitan, the Financial Times, and Good Morning America.
Writing Style and Themes
Huang writes new-adult and contemporary romance built around “alpha” heroes, strong-willed heroines, high emotional stakes, and generous steam. Her books lean into beloved romance tropes — grumpy/sunshine, enemies to lovers, forced proximity, arranged marriage — executed with sharp banter and slow-burn tension. As a Chinese-American author, she weaves aspects of Asian culture and identity into her stories, and her globe-trotting settings reflect her love of travel. The books are known for their addictive, binge-readable pacing, which made them ideal BookTok material.
Legacy
Huang is one of the clearest success stories of the self-publishing-to-traditional pipeline and of TikTok as a book-discovery engine. She helped establish the commercial template for the 2020s romance boom: trope-forward, diverse-cast, social-media-native storytelling that turned independent authors into global bestsellers without traditional gatekeepers. With a Netflix adaptation in development, her cultural footprint is still expanding.
