Chelsea Abdullah

Chelsea Abdullah is a Kuwaiti-American writer born and raised in Kuwait, with an MA in English from Duquesne University and an undergraduate degree from the University of Colorado Boulder. Her debut novel, The Stardust Thief (2022), opened the Sandsea Trilogy and drew on the tradition of One Thousand and One Nights, weaving stories within stories around jinn hunted for their magical relics; Publishers Weekly praised its atmospheric worldbuilding and sense of wonder. She continued the trilogy with The Ashfire King (2025), with a concluding volume still to come. Abdullah's fiction is distinguished by its layered, nested storytelling style and its grounding in Arabian and Islamicate folklore rather than the European traditions more common in mainstream fantasy.