About Diana Urban

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Diana Urban is a bestselling, award-winning author of romantic thrillers with mind-bending twists, including All Your Twisted Secrets and Under the Surface, an Indie Next Pick and Junior Library Guild selection. All her novels have been published internationally. She lives with her husband and cat in Boston, and when she’s not torturing her fictional characters, she enjoys reading, playing video games, fawning over cute animals, and looking at the beach from a safe distance. Visit her online at dianaurban.com.

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Fun Facts About Me

As much as I’d like to be a mysterious figure lurking in the shadows, I want it easy for students to do their homework! Here are fun facts based on questions I frequently get from students. (See general FAQs here.)

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Where did you go to college?

I graduated from Boston University with a Bachelor of Science in Advertising.

Fun fact: I was one class away from minoring in Psychology, but I had enough credits to take a semester off and work at a tech startup full-time for seven months (summer through fall semester) before doing a film/TV “study abroad” program in Los Angeles for my final spring semester. Taking a semester off let me gain invaluable work experience and saved me lots of money, and I’m glad I did it! Sometimes you learn more from your internships than you do in class.

Where did you grow up?

New York. First Brooklyn until I was seven, then up to suburbia in Westchester until I went to college in Boston.

Do you write full time or have a day job?

For many years I wrote while working a day job as a marketing manager at tech startups. I’d wake up at 5 or 6 a.m. to write before work, squeeze in an hour of writing during my lunch break, and spend most weekends writing. After I secured my third publishing contract, I left my day job to focus on writing.

I’m now a full-time author and freelance in content marketing and copywriting.

What inspired you to become a writer?

Growing up, I never imagined I’d become an author. I’d always been a bookworm, but world building, red herrings, character development, tension, pacing… it all seemed like rocket science. I envisioned authors plopping down at their desks and writing a polished book from start to finish without understanding all the steps that usually come in between. Since it seemed so impossible, I didn’t even bother to try. I was too afraid to fail.

Then one day on a business trip in Paris in 2012, something terrifying happened in front of me on the métro, and a whole story dropped into my brain, fully formed. The desire to tell that story overpowered my fear of failure, and it poured out of me in a month—years of repressed creativity unleashed! It took me two more months to revise it, and shortly after, I signed with my first literary agent. That novel never sold to a publisher and is now trunked, but once I started writing, I couldn’t stop. Four years later, with my third literary agent, I got my first book deal for All Your Twisted Secrets… and the rest is history.

I think about that moment in Paris a lot. If I hadn’t been on that exact train car at that exact time, would I have started writing? I like to think so. But sometimes it seems a singular moment tears your reality in half and sets you down alternate paths, a la Sliding Doors. So who knows?

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What is your writing process like?

I usually have a high stakes plot idea and a general sense of the story’s direction, then write an incredibly messy draft that’s just to get to know the characters I throw into that situation—their motivations, backstories, internal conflicts, and relationships with each other. I call this a “zero draft” because it’s so messy, I don’t even count it as the first draft. Then I rewrite the whole thing for a “real” first draft and revise over 4, 5, or 6 drafts before sending it to my agent or editor. With each revision, I layer in motivations, complexity, backstories, red herrings, descriptions, and make the protagonist’s voice more voicey. The time it takes me to write a complete manuscript depends on the story; it’s ranged anywhere from 3 months to 2 years!

How did you learn how to write books?

By consuming a LOT of stories. That’s it. That’s the secret. I didn’t go to school for writing, didn’t get an MFA, didn’t take a single creative writing course in college. When I first got started, I read some books on writing—see my list of recs here. Other than that, it’s been purely “learn by example”—books, of course, but also TV shows, movies, and video games. Over time I’ve gleaned what I’d consider best practices in terms of pacing, tension, character development, and so on. I also honed my writing skills at my past day jobs in content marketing. It was all very gradual and extremely unscientific, which might be why my writing process is so chaotic. But it works for me. There’s no one correct way to write a book!

What are your favorite books?

Growing up, I loved all of R.L. Stine’s Fear Streetbooks. I lived for his twist endings and loved how each chapter ended on a cliffhanger, so I couldn’t stop reading. I learned from the best!

As an adult, what I consider my “favorite” books are those I can read over and over—either comfort reads or those with plots I find impressively propulsive. These include but are definitely not limited to: The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, The Martian by Andy Weir, Uprooted by Naomi Novik, Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

What are your favorite video games?

Unlike books, I have no qualms ranking my favorite video games:

Mass Effect Legendary Edition (yes, all three games—it’s basically one continuous story, so.)
Dragon Age Inquisition (I do also love DA2 and Veilguard. DAO’s gameplay punts it off the list, but if they ever remaster it, I’d probably just change this bullet point to “Dragon Age Series”)
Baldur’s Gate 3
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (nearly tied with BG3, honestly)
Mass Effect Andromeda
The Last of Us
Fallout 4
The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
The Sims

Also, fun fact: MortalDusk in These Deadly Games was inspired by Skyrim and Fortnight, one of my husband’s favorite games!

There is no Shepard without Vakarian.

If there’s another question you’d like me to answer, let me know here.

News & Buzz

Under the Surface

Under the Surface hit a regional Indie Bestseller List!

American Booksellers Association: Under the Surface is a September/October 2024 Kids' Indie Next Pick!

Kirkus: 6 Back-to-School Novels that Deliver Teen Drama (September 2024)

Amazon: The #1 Best YA Book & Personal Editor Pick for August 2024

Publishers Weekly: "A delight from start to finish" ⭐️ starred review ⭐️ (May 2024)

The Nerd Daily: Read an Excerpt from 'Under the Surface' by Diana Urban (May 2024)

Junior Library Guild: Under the Surface is a 2024 Gold Standard Selection! (May 2024)

Kirkus: "A nonstop thrill ride through an eerily claustrophobic setting: (May 2024)

Goodreads: New YA Books to Keep Teens (and Adults!) Reading All Summer Long (May 2024)

SheReads: Most Anticipated YA Thrillers of Summer 2024 (April 2024)

Key Information About My Books

For more details, visit my individual book pages.

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Title: Under the Surface
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House
Release date: August 13th, 2024
Formats: Hardcover, ebook, audio
Rights sold: Ukraine, The Netherlands, Poland, more TBA
ISBN-10: 0593625080
ISBN-13: 978-0593625088

Ruby is terrified to cave to her feelings for Sean and risk him crushing her heart.

Sean is pumped to spend a week with Ruby in Paris on their senior class trip, and he’ll wait however long until she’s ready to take things further.

But when Ruby’s best friend sneaks out the first night to meet a mysterious French boy, Ruby goes after her with two classmates, but caves to another temptation: attending mystery boy’s exclusive party in the Paris catacombs, the intricate web of tunnels beneath the city, home to six million long-dead Parisians. Only they never reach the party.

Underground, as something sinister chases them, they get lost in the endless maze of bones, uncovering dark secrets about the catacombs….and each other. And if they can’t find a way out, they’ll die in the dark beneath the City of Light.

Aboveground, Sean races to find the girl he loves as a media frenzy over the four missing teens begins.

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Title: All Your Twisted Secrets
Publisher: HarperTeen / HarperCollins
Release date: March 17th, 2020
Formats: Hardcover, ebook, audio
Rights sold: UK, Canada, Australia, France, Russia, Romania, Czech Republic, Spain
ISBN-10: 0062908219
ISBN-13: 978-0062908216

What do the queen bee, star athlete, valedictorian, stoner, loner, and music geek all have in common? They were all invited to a scholarship dinner, only to discover it’s a trap. Someone has locked them into a room with a bomb, a syringe filled with poison, and a note saying they have an hour to pick someone to kill … or else everyone dies.

Amber Prescott is determined to get her classmates and herself out of the room alive, but that might be easier said than done. No one knows how they’re all connected or who would want them dead. As they retrace the events over the past year that might have triggered their captor’s ultimatum, it becomes clear that everyone is hiding something. And with the clock ticking down, confusion turns into fear, and fear morphs into panic as they race to answer the biggest question: Who will they choose to die?

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Title: These Deadly Games
Publisher: Wednesday Books / Macmillan
Release date: February 1, 2022
Formats: Hardcover, ebook, audio
Rights sold: Spain, Romania, Hungary, Czech Republic
ISBN-10: 1250797195
ISBN-13: 978-1250797193

When Crystal Donavan gets a message on a mysterious app with a video of her little sister gagged and bound, she agrees to play the kidnapper’s game. At first, they make her complete bizarre tasks: steal a test and stuff it in a locker, bake brownies, make a prank call.

But then Crystal realizes each task is meant to hurt—and kill—her friends, one by one. But if she refuses to play, the kidnapper will kill her sister. Is someone trying to take her team out of the running for a gaming tournament? Or have they uncovered a secret from their past, and wants them to pay for what they did…

As Crystal makes the impossible choices between her friends and her sister, she must uncover the truth and find a way to outplay the kidnapper… before it’s too late.

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Title: Lying in the Deep
Publisher: Razorbill Books / Penguin Random House
Release date: May 2, 2023
Formats: Hardcover, ebook, audio
Rights sold: Spain
ISBN-10: 0593527607
ISBN-13: 978-0593527603

A juicy mystery of jealousy, love, and betrayal set on a Semester at Sea-inspired cruise ship, with a diverse cast of delightfully suspicious characters who’ll leave you guessing with every jaw-dropping twist.

After being jilted by her ex-boyfriend and best friend, Jade couldn’t be more ready to embark on the adventure of a lifetime—11 countries in 4 months, all from the luxurious Campus on Board ship—and to wedge an entire globe between her and the people who broke her heart.

But when Jade discovers the backstabbing couple are also setting sail, her obsession with them grows and festers, leading to a shocking murder. And as their friends begin to drop like flies, Jade and her new crush must race to clear her name and find the killer they’re trapped at sea with….before anyone else winds up in body bags.

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About Diana Urban

Fun Facts About Me

No display

Where did you go to college?

Where did you grow up?

Do you write full time or have a day job?

What inspired you to become a writer?

No display

What is your writing process like?

How did you learn how to write books?

What are your favorite books?

What are your favorite video games?

News & Buzz

Under the Surface

Lying in the Deep

All Your Twisted Secrets

These Deadly Games

Other Mentions

Key Information About My Books

For a limited time, get this shocking story FREE

Connect With Me