Chapter And Verse

As she launches her second children’s book, author Nadine Aisha Jassat shares her poetry-writing evolution and novel inspirations

- DAWN GEDDES

IT'S been a very busy year for poet and author Nadine Aisha Jassat. When The Scots Magazine caught up with her, the Edinburgh-based writer had just returned from a "joy filled" trip to South Africa where she'd been on a book tour visiting schools, bookshops and libraries in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria with her first children's novel, The Stories Grandma Forgot. Now she's launching her second book, The Hidden Story of Estie Noor, a page-turning mystery novel about identity, friendship and learning to use your voice (out 9th May).

"One of the questions that children ask me a lot when I do school visits is, 'when did you know you wanted to be a writer?"" Nadine says.

"I think I was always meant to be a writer because I loved it from a very young age. The first book I ever wrote was when I was 12 years old! In terms of writing professionally, I worked in a completely different career for a time, and started doing writing workshops and just loved them.

"I really grew into my voice, and I grew into my confidence in the same way. I think I started out whispering 'I am a poet', and by the end, after years and years of encouragement from my peers and workshops and performances and publications, I got to the stage of being able to say 'I'm a poet!' with confidence."

The writer's first poetry collection, Let Me Tell You This, was published by Scottish publisher 404 Ink in 2019.

"I always felt that I wanted to tell stories in a full, broad sense. I wanted to tell them through poetry. I wanted to tell them through fiction. And I was already writing short stories and essays drawing on my own life for places like the anthology of essays It's Not About The Burqa.

"Then I had this voice of a young girl in my mind, who was living with her grandma with Alzheimer's. She was a mixed girl, who was trying to understand who she was. That was where The Stories Grandma Forgot began.