What is your most recent creative project?
I have a second novel draft that has been finished for a while now, but I’m still working on it. It’s a complex novel based in Syria but also across the sea to Europe and finally Copenhagen. It’s based on a true story and is a tale about refuge, torture and retribution but most importantly love. Its title is The Tower of The White Pigeon.
Why do you love what you do and what inspired you to begin?
I’ve been a photographer and journalist for almost two decades. I have loved writing since I was a child and I wanted to make a difference in people’s lives with the stories I have to share.
If you could collaborate with any other creative in the world, who would it be and what would you make together?
I would like to work with Arif Anwar or Michael Mohammed Ahmad and we would compose a love story explored outside of the Western hemisphere of thinking.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given that you try to incorporate in your approach to work and creativity?
To not be afraid of writing what is in my heart, even though it might not ring big sales for publishers or be the typecast setup of a novel – with the hook, the body, the end. The best piece of advice I’ve ever been given is to be true to my own writing, and nobody else’s idea of what writing is supposed to be.
What are you reading at the moment?
Diary of a Country Prosecutor by Tawfiq al-Hakim. Highly recommend it. It’s so funny. Such dark Egyptian humour and it would expand English reader’s view of how vast writing is as a world craft.
When and where do you feel most creative?
When I am in touch with my emotions. Where doesn’t matter – to me.
If you could travel to any destination tomorrow, where would it be and why?
It doesn’t matter where I go, I have to take myself with me, so the question is arbitrary unless I can travel through time. Which I cannot. But for the sake of the question, if I could, I’d go back 20 years in time and find so many of those I love, still here.