“It was important to me because people keep seeing this region as either demonized or as romanticized in fiction,” author Hafsah Faizal said, referring to the Middle East. “so when I started ‘We Hunt The Flame,’ I wanted it to be a place that was home.”
While writing any debut novel can take years, Faizal also started over early on in the writing process because she realized that something about her books' setting didn’t feel right.
“The map closely resembled the Mediterranean region, and that is so close to Arabia. I thought, ‘Why am I not setting it in a place that is more familiar to me?’” Faizal, who is of Sri Lankan and Arab descent, said. “So I redid the whole thing.”While Faizal is very open about her life as a Muslim author now, very few readers knew that she is Muslim who wears a niqab — the veil some Muslim women wear to cover their faces — for the first few years of her blogging career.
“The more my platform grew, the more worried I became — ‘Once they see that I wear this, will they just disappear?’ ‘Will they treat me differently?’" she said. “I was just worried about a whole bunch of things. But once I put my photo online, it was perfectly fine.”
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