SAARA EL-ARIFI

Reimagining fantasy: meet one of the brightest new stars in the genre

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 So it was that, as an unpublished novelist, she submitted to an agent she calls “the biggest dealmaker in Europe”, Juliet Mushens.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.”

While, she says, The Final Strife deals with “black pain”, Faebound is about “black joy” – albeit with a certain amount of uber-violence thrown in. “[A friend] was like, ‘300 people die in the first chapter.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, but it gets better, it’s fine.’”

A TALE OF TWO SISTERS

The book’s central relationship is between two sisters: Yeeran, an elven colonel, and Lettle, a diviner who catches glimpses of the future. But these aren’t the mystical elves of Tolkien. Instead, these are sisters living through a neverending war. Once, the elves shared their world with fae and humans, but these species are now the stuff of myth. A catastrophic career move leads to the duo discovering that legends can sometimes be true…

The trilogy, she says, plays with ideas of “erasure” and hidden realms. “The woodland fairy creatures of West Africa were something I looked into,” adds El-arifi, who has an MA in African Studies. “There’s an idea this was a story implanted during colonisation, but there’s evidence that’s not the case.”

There’s tension between the two sisters but also love. “I think there’s something magical about siblings, sibling rivalry, and also those inane arguments that you have, that are so stupid but so funny at the same time,” El-arifi says of a book that’s dedicated to her own younger sister. One of the images in it is of two sisters fused together by the scars of their lives, the marks of poverty in early life. “A scar is not a good thing, but it is a healing thing,” she adds.

As for her own upbringing, El-arifi’s official bio describes her as having “a DNA profile that lights up like a satellite photograph of Earth”. She was initially raised in the Middle East, in Abu Dhabi. “My dad was a horse vet for the sheikh in the UAE,” she says. But the work was stressful, and the family relocated to “a village outside of Sheffield”.

SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS

This was quite a shock. While El-arifi was initially excited at the thought of school dinners, which she’d learned about in international school – “It was always pink custard, and I didn’t understand why it was pink, but it was great” – she discovered there were downsides to life in the UK. On her first day of secondary school, “someone used the ‘n’ word. And I had never heard it before. I didn’t know what it was.”

Fitting in was tough. “I spent so much time trying to assimilate,” she remembers. “Even until my early thirties, I was still straightening my hair.” It was through writing, she says, that she came to understand the racism she faced. From a young age, she liked to create “make-believe worlds”, sharing these with her sister, who “spent a lot of time in hospital” as a youngster. “Stories are what allowed us to escape the moment.”

At other times, El-arifi’s gift for invention led to trouble, as when she gave a school presentation about her horse. She didn’t actually own a horse, couldn’t even ride, but raided her father’s files for a picture of a purebred that was probably worth millions. “There was a ‘horse girl’ in the audience. She was like, ‘I don’t think that was your horse…’” Like any good storyteller should, El-arifi doubled down.

After school she travelled, working in Switzerland and Ghana, where she taught in the school her greatgrandfather built. She went to university in Canterbury and studied theatre, before moving to London, where she worked in film marketing, including at Pinewood. “There’s nowhere I feel more invisible,” she says of the capital, “and that’s such a joy to me, to be able to just walk around and not feel like I stand out.” Better to let her talent be seen through her writing.

Faebound is out now, published by Harpervoyager.

I think there’s something magical about siblings and those inane arguments you have