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Country Focus: Scotland Author Profile
Award-winning poet and novelist Dean Attahas penned a new YA novel-in-verse loosely based on his own relocation from London to Glasgow
Caroline Carpenter @carolinec1988 D
ean Ata clearly remembers when he moved to Scotland as it was the day aſter the book launch for his award-winning 2019 YA début, The Black
Flamingo (Hodder Children’s Books). It was “a big move” for him as until then, apart from his time at universit in Brighton, he had always lived in London. The transition provided inspiration for his new YA novel-in-verse, Only on the Weekends (to be published by Hodder Children’s on 12th May). “I saw so much on arrival that inspired me—I just had to find a way to set a book here,” he explains. “I thought a boy moving from London to Glasgow makes perfect sense, because that was my journey too.” The book’s narrator is 15-year-old Mackintosh (Mack), who relocates to Glasgow when his filmmaker father takes on a new project there. Life in Scotland is a shock to his system, but he already has a connection to the area as it is where his parents fell in love and conceived him. Ata says: “It was really important to see this book not just as a boy moving here for the first time, it is also a homecoming of sorts. It’s like he is part of Scotland before he even visits for the first time, or Scotland is part of him.” Mack’s move comes just aſter he has established a tenta- tive relationship with his crush Karim. He soon befriends the subject of his father’s film, a trans boy called Finlay, and finds himself torn between the two objects of his affec- tion. Though he had already pinned down the premise of the book, Ata was not sure which way the narrative would go until he started writing it, and originally penned three different endings to the story. He says: “I wanted to have characters that had a lot of complications, and those things coming into conflict with one another was the interesting thing for me. There are a lot of opportunities for them to go one way or the other. Hopefully it keeps the reader on their toes, guessing what choices these characters are going to make. That was really exciting for me.” Ata is a poet as well as a novelist, and he says of his writ- ing process when working on a verse novel: “I give each section as much atention as I would give an individual poem. I put the same rigour into it, the only difference is that they have to hold together to tell a story.” Though
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Only on the Weekend shares many themes with The Black Flamingo—“masculinit, boyhood, coming into an idea of who you are going to be as a man”—he distinguishes it from its predecessor, saying: “I knew this was a chance to do something completely different. I had to write The Black Flamingo first to be able to feel freer to write a book about romance and something not overtly political, giving a bit more space for characters to have flaws and be problematic at times.”
He continues: “This book is a love story, but there are many loves involved. The family love is very important, as well as the romantic love.” Aſter writing about a single mother in The Black Flamingo, Ata wanted to tackle a father-son relationship in this book. He says: “I tried to make Mack’s dad very human and have qualities that Mack finds challenging, but so many endearing qualities as well.” Their relationship is complicated further by the fact that Mack’s mother is dead, with Ata explaining: “I wanted to find a way to help a young person think about grief from their own perspective, but also from the perspective that their parent might be grieving.”
Lochs are key Ata’s new home and the “amazing canvas” the country’s landscape provides has greatly inspired elements of the book. “Using the seting, as well as the characters, to tell the story was really important to me,” he says. “Lots of it was informed by going on walks or being out in our camper van in the Highlands, going to different Scotish islands. I might have writen a conversation and thought, ‘Rather than set it in the flat, how about it happens on a mountain?’ Being by a loch can make a conversation have different resonance than if it was happening in a park.” Since moving to Scotland, Ata has felt “very welcomed” by the country’s literature scene and has thrown himself into it wholeheartedly. As well as working with the Universit of Glasgow and Scotish Book Trust, being part of Glasgow Children’s Writers Group and leading Open Book’s BAME Creative Writing Group for a year, he has appeared at literary festivals in Edinburgh, Wigtown and
Metadata
Imprint Hodder Children’s Books Publication 12.05.22 Format PB (£7.99) ISBN 9781444960563
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