I was therefore very lucky that I met my lovely publisher, Alice Curry, at the London Book Fair after an interesting panel discussion that I was part of with Daniel Hahn and Ruth Ahmedzai. When I first looked at the children’s books industry in the UK from the outside I thought I would never get published- there were too many ‘horror’ stories circulating among authors and illustrators on how competitive and difficult it is to find an agent or a publisher. And although I initially never thought of myself as a ‘cultural diversity author’ (because I see my positionality as ‘normal’ and all I know) I’m more than happy to create stories that may help in highlighting under-represented voices in a time of extreme binaries and misrepresentation. Interestingly, I soon realized that my work in the UK would be labeled as ‘culturally diverse stories’. Towards the end of 2012 however, I left Syria because of the war and moved to London, and then set upon writing about what I knew.
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