TC journalist ‘honoured’ to interview Malala for Vogue cover
A UK journalist of Turkish Cypriot origin has told of the “honour” of being asked to interview Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai for the cover story of Vogue magazine.
Şirin Kale, whose mother is Turkish Cypriot, was asked to interview Malala for the July edition of the British version of Vogue, which hit newsstands yesterday.
Girls’ education campaigner Malala, 23, survived being shot in the head by a Taliban gunman in north-west Pakistan in 2012. Two years later she became
the youngest ever winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Vogue spent three days getting to know her in London in April, including a photo shoot and an “indepth” interview with Kale, which also includes comments from former US first lady Michelle Obama and Apple chief Tim Cook.
“It felt amazing to interview Malala,” Kale, who has been a journalist for six years, told Cyprus Today.
“I’d followed her activism for many years and was in awe of her strength, bravery, and dedication to female education.
“And of course, it was lovely to be writing a cover profile. Although I have written for British Vogue in the past, I’d never been asked to do a cover profile — that is an honour, and I was very pleased to be asked.
“Interviewing Malala herself was brilliant — she was so generous with her time and answered all my questions honestly (a rarity when interviewing high profile people!).
“I expected to be impressed by her, of course, but I didn’t expect to like her so much — she’s a really fun, sweet, smart person, and that shone through in the time we spent together.”
Asked if the pair talked about Cyprus and her Turkish Cypriot background, Kale replied: “We didn’t talk about me being from Northern Cyprus, but when we talked about why Malala wears the headscarf we talked about the fact that we are both women from Muslim backgrounds, so it came up in a roundabout way.”
Giving more information about her family background, the journalist, who this year has been shortlisted for an Orwell Prize, a prestigious British journalism award, for her reporting on Covid for the Guardian newspaper, continued: “My mother Emine was born in Akıncılar in 1960. She moved to the UK in the late 1970s to study, met my dad, who is Iranian, and I was born in London.
“My grandparents Sherife and İsmail still live in Girne. I used to spend most of my summer holidays when I was little in northern Cyprus, although I have not been back since I was a child. I would love to return soon.” In March Kale, who has a first class degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford, and a master’s degree with distinction in International Relations from King’s College London, wrote an article for Vice.com in which she highlighted how Turkish Cypriot voices are “rarely seen” in food writing about Cyprus. In it she recalled how her “subeditor had a stroke” when she included “the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” in a newspaper article and was told that the term “is not in our style guide”. Asked about the incident, she said: “I would prefer not to name the publication, however what I will say is that it has been very frustrating to see even a respected UK newspaper that will not interview or hear the perspective of Turkish Cypriots at all — for example, most of the recent coverage around hellim/halloumi exports has only featured Greek mainland or Greek Cypriot voices, and often these articles don’t interview a single Turkish Cypriot person.
“Most UK journalists don’t understand Cypriot politics or have a very negative view of Turkish Cypriot people.”
She added: “I always wanted to be a journalist: English was my favourite subject at school . . . I mostly write for the Guardian newspaper and a few other publications now.”