THE WAY FORWARD, SAARA EL-ARIFI DECIDED, was to risk failing big. So it was that, as an unpublished novelist, she submitted to an agent she calls “the biggest dealmaker in Europe”, Juliet Mushens. It paid off. “I think she gets 700 queries a week, but she came back to me in 10 minutes and said, ‘Can I have the whole manuscript?’”
Life since has been a “whirlwind”, partly set in motion by El-Arifi’s own fierce work ethic. Her third novel Faebound, the opening volume in a new trilogy, follows swiftly on the heels of two instalments in her Ending Fire trilogy. “My ambition is unparalleled,” she tells SFX and, while she’s more than self aware enough to deliver this line in a self-deprecating way, there’s clearly a grain of truth in it.
So why did her debut The Final Strife attract so much attention? At least in part, she says, it was because, after 14 years of trying to get published, she questioned why she’d been writing a book “where the main character was a white man”. Looking around on the Tube one day, she realised that her bookshelves, filled with fantasy novels, didn’t reflect London’s diversity. “My superpower is being black,” she says, “and I didn’t know that. When I actually sat down and wrote the novel that I should have been writing from the very start, I wrote it in four months.”
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Denne historien er fra February 2024-utgaven av SFX UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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True Detective - The Only Way Is Essex for Jessica Jones in Lisa Jewell's first Marvel Crime novel
Known for bestselling psychological thrillers such as Then She Was Gone and The Family Upstairs, Jewell says she initially overemphasised the Marvel Universe’s fantastical elements before realising that she should simply trust her natural instincts. “I went too far on many occasions and had to keep cutting stuff out because I’d end up with stuff like a huge underground lab full of mad scientists,” she laughs.
Future Shock - Futurama's David X Cohen talks about what's in store for the show's ninth season
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Who Says
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Parallel Doomsday
Terminator Zero creator Mattson Tomlin explains where the anime series fits within canon
Growing Your Hare
Daniel Kokotajlo talks about his '70s-set folk horror film Starve Acre
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