Ali Hazelwood, the former neuroscientist whose Star Wars fan fiction became The Love Hypothesis

Ali Hazelwood

Born	December 11, 1989 Italy
Occupation	Writer
Awards	Goodreads Choice Award for Best Young Adult Fiction

The first draft of a Hollywood franchise is still sitting, in a sense, on a fan-fiction website. Ali Hazelwood, a name that appears on no birth certificate, wrote it as a story about Rey and Kylo Ren from Star Wars, dropped into a university biology department where the only weapons are grant applications and seminar questions. She was a working neuroscientist at the time, and romance was what she wrote after hours.

That story became The Love Hypothesis, and the novel did something few debuts manage: it gave booksellers a new shelf. Readers called it STEM romance, the press settled on “STEMinist”, and the heroines who followed are graduate students, physicists, neuroscientists and engineers whose troubles belong to the lab as much as the bedroom. Who gets funded. Who gets believed. Which senior man can end a career with one remark in a seminar. The kissing sells the books; the institution is what she knows from the inside.

Hazelwood grew up in Italy, lived in Japan and then Germany, and moved to the United States for a PhD in neuroscience, where her research dealt with brain stimulation and cognitive neuroscience. She taught as a professor for about three years and left academia in 2022 to write full time. She has always published under a pen name, and the official biography she offers is deliberately small: three cats, a husband she describes as almost equally feline, crochet, candy, and long evenings on Archive of Our Own, the fan-fiction site where her career began and where she says she still prowls.

The route from that site to a bookshop ran through an agent. The Reylo story went up on Archive of Our Own in 2018; in 2020 a literary agent approached her about it, and the rewrite, with new names and no lightsabers, was published by Berkley in September 2021. The Love Hypothesis spent more than 40 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. Fan fiction had fed romance publishing before, but Hazelwood arrived just as BookTok was turning readers into a sales force, and her premise, a PhD student who fakes a relationship with the most feared professor in her department, travelled as easily in a short phone video as in paperback.

Then came output at a speed academic life would never have allowed. Love on the Brain (2022) sent a neuroscientist to co-lead a NASA project alongside her old graduate-school nemesis. Three novellas from the same year were gathered as Loathe to Love You. Love, Theoretically (2023) gave the formula its sharpest premise: a theoretical physicist, Elsie Hannaway, who teaches as an adjunct and works on the side as a fake girlfriend booked through an app. That same year Check & Mate, her first young-adult novel, moved the rivalry to a chessboard and won the Goodreads Choice Award for best young adult fiction.

The swerve came with Bride (2024), a paranormal romance about a vampire who enters a marriage of convenience with a werewolf alpha. The book landed on the New York Public Library’s list of the best books for adults of 2024 and got a sequel, Mate, in 2025. In between she kept the campus novels coming: Not in Love (2024), Deep End (2025), about a Stanford diver and a champion swimmer, and Problematic Summer Romance, a spin-off of Not in Love.

Fame has also cost her something that has nothing to do with books. In April 2025 she cancelled and refunded a run of events in the United Kingdom, writing on Instagram that it was “not possible for me to safely travel outside and then back inside the US”, the country where she lives. For a writer whose own life story is a list of countries, it was an unusually stark sentence. Her publisher declined to comment further.

The screen has now caught up with the page. Prime Video released its film of The Love Hypothesis worldwide on 23 September 2026, directed by Claire Scanlon from a screenplay by Sarah Rothschild, with Lili Reinhart as Olive Smith and Tom Bateman as Adam Carlsen; Hazelwood and Reinhart are among the executive producers. Within a day it topped the service’s film chart in 49 countries, according to FlixPatrol’s daily charts, and it was still at the head of Prime Video’s film ranking the following week.

Hazelwood answered with news of her own. On 29 September she announced The Two-Body Problem, a sequel that returns to Olive and Adam, due from Berkley on 2 February 2027, and said the film and its cast had made her “fall for Adam and Olive all over again”. MRC is already developing it for Amazon MGM Studios. Amazon MGM also has Love, Theoretically in development, with Sofia Alvarez writing and directing and Colleen Hoover producing, while Netflix is adapting Deep End with Laura Kosann on the script, Shawn Levy and Alex Cooper among the producers and Hazelwood as an executive producer. A paranormal novella duology, Bound and Unbound, arrived in October.

None of this reads like a professor who left the lab. It reads like someone who took the lab with her. Hazelwood’s novels keep asking whether a feeling that starts inside a contrivance, a fake date, a contract, a rivalry, can still count as evidence, and her career has become the larger version of the same experiment. A story written for a fan-fiction archive became a film streamed around the world. The data, for now, says the hypothesis holds.

Tags: writers, novelists, Lili Reinhart, The Love Hypothesis, Ali Hazelwood, Bride