SHANNON CHAKRABORTY

Ahoy there! Meet the writer launching a new nautical fantasy trilogy

- Jonathan Wright

WHEN YOU’RE BUSY, SOMETIMES ALL you want to do is take some time for yourself. This was the situation facing Shannon Chakraborty a few years back. Trying to find a literary agent as an unpublished novelist at a point in her life when she was also a new mother, she would grab precious moments to work on her fiction.

“[I was] taking a couple of hours a week to go to write at a café,” she remembers. “It felt like that was almost a selfish decision. So I started thinking a lot about parenthood, specifically motherhood and the roles we put on women when it comes to what is your duty to your family, or other things that you want in your life?”

However dimly seen, the star of Chakraborty’s new novel, Amina al-Sirafi– a legendary pirate who’s trying to leave her seafaring days behind her and focus on raising her child – had begun to sail into view. Of course, the call of the ocean is eternal, so when al-Sirafiis essentially blackmailed into returning to the fray, she’s not as upset as she might be.

A second major inspiration for The Adventures Of Amina al-Sirafi, the first volume in a new trilogy, was Chakraborty’s love of history. Specifically, she’s fascinated by the societies that grew up around the Indian Ocean in the medieval era.

A SINBAD MIXER