Talia Hibbert - Author of Romance Novels

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For a brief period, Talia Hibbert thought she was going to be a lawyer. Now, a little over three years since graduating from the University of Leicester in her native U.K., Hibbert, 24, is a bestselling author about to see her 18th novel published.

Act Your Age, Eve Brown (Avon, Mar. 2021) follows a woman who is described in the book as “a certified hot mess” with purple hair. After she botches an interview for a head chef job at a charming B&B, she winds up in a fender bender with the B&B’s owner. The crash leaves Jacob Wayne with a broken arm and only worsens his staff shortage. He’s forced to hire Eve, and he begins to discover that the more time they spend together, the more he likes having her around.

The novel is the third book Hibbert’s published with a major house, after making her name self-publishing. Big house or no house, her output is impressive.

She describes the beginning of her writing career as a leap of faith: “I was starting my final year at university, and I was thinking about how by the end of that year I would have to sort out a job.” She’s on the autism spectrum and was faced with daunting questions about her future. She says she knew it would be hard to get a job because of her autism. “People think you’re unreliable or they don’t want to deal with the red tape.”

Romance publishing has had a long history of marginalizing BIPOC writers. In the 37-year history of the RITA Awards (the onetime Oscars of romance writing), only two Black women won top honors.

"I knew I would have to work twice as hard to have a chance,” Hibbert says. Her success in the indie romance space opened the door to the traditional publishing world.

Diversity has been a divisive topic in romance publishing, but that has slowly been changing. For this reason, Act Your Age, Eve Brown is a special novel for Hibbert. “One thing I wanted to do was write an autistic romance,” she says.

This is not the first autistic character Hibbert’s written, but it is the first she’s written in which both protagonists are autistic. “That’s the relationship I’m in,” she says.

Being able to put her experience on the page has allowed Hibbert to attempt to deepen the way readers look at diversity. Eve and Jacob share a disability, and yet, Hibbert explains, “they have incredibly different perspectives and they’re affected by their autism in different ways.”