World War Two setting and the children are experiencing war, but here we are in 2024 and one in five children are impacted by war around the world – and that is unfathomable.
“This story of shared Muslim and Jewish history. For many people, this vision of Muslims and Jews together can only bring visions of conflict and war. But this story is just one of countless instances in which the opposite is true – Muslims and Jews have lived together in cities, and lands form Jerusalem and Andalusía and various communities around the world. We are being fed reductive and polarising tropes and the rate and intensity of that is increasing. I think literature like this can be a humanising force, and needs to be a humanising force,
“I hope the novel challenges those conventional ideas. It tells the story of a resistance mission of those in the mosque, but just telling this story is also a type of resistance against the erasure and the narratives we are being fed.” Safiyyah’s War is not the first time Hiba
has explored the notion of erasure and hidden truths as an author. She came into the profession via a circuitous route that took in science, teaching, refugee advocacy, sustainability, and diplomacy – driven by a curiosity and desire to challenge convention, but always with the written word as an anchor. She says: “In terms of my journey to actually becoming a writer, and looking back, it had always been central to who I was and the way I process the world from a young age. I remember that words as things, as a concept, as entities were important. At a young age I was a deep thinker, and I took in quite a lot and absorbed quite a lot, and at points I really struggled to exist in the world and to navigate the world without words. At a young age it was subconscious, and it became more conscious to me that the world is strange and beautiful, but also ugly. It can be full of light, but also darkness, and it can feel quite chaotic at times. For me to process and deal with this weird and wonderful and tragic and illuminated space, would be impossible without words.
I had a grounding ritual of writing in my diary from about the age of six and also writing stories from a young age. Stories were very innate to me, there was this tangle sometimes with myself and beyond myself – words felt like this empowering means to pull threads out of that tangle and to start to pull and to work with them and weave with them and create something that made it all make sense somehow. “I was writing poetry, and my first poem was published when I was about eight, and it was called Need or Greed and it was about the environment. I was a writer in the true sense, the words were in my blood and in my bones, but I didn’t realise I could do this as a profession. So that was why I went to look at other courses and fulfil these other interests that I had. It was probably only the last couple of years that I realised, OK maybe I can do this.” That realisation came following what might be considered a fairly mundane route of answering an advert and submitting a CV. She says: “I had this distant dream of writing a novel, maybe a cathartic or therapeutic process, rather than this going to be something that sells in bookshops. It was literally just me pulling out these threads of chaos that I was witnessing around me and form within me. Initially it was really adult publishing that seemed most likely.
“I had followed various bits and pieces from publishers on social media – there was a curiosity, rather than being really driven or even being a realistic option for me. But there was an open call from Puffin as they were launching their Extraordinary Lives series and you just needed to send in your CV. I had dabbled in some freelance journalism which was
10 PEN&INC.
another outlet for me. But I did send my CV on a whim and heard back, and they invited me to do some sample writing.” That led to Hiba being commissioned to write for The Extraordinary Life… series of books, and the story of Malala Yousafzai. Following that release, Hiba returned to her science and engineering roots – she had studied engineering at university and gone on to become a physics teacher. Her two follow-up books, How to Spaghettify Your Dog and Inspiring Inventors who are changing our world both touch on hidden depths in different ways. She says she wanted children to see the beauty, wonder and mystery in physics, something she felt was missing from the way science is taught in schools, adding: “It is mysterious and bizarre and brilliant and surprising and fantastical. It’s almost a magical realm – and I thought people were growing up and missing out on this. There’s a collective sigh when you mention physics, but I used to stay up late thinking about quantum physics and writers who loved it in the same way as I did. And I thought children are missing out on this incredible world, so by combining creativity with a bit of silliness we got something really unique.”
Autumn-Winter 2024
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