Brandford Boase Shortlist Q & A with Janeen Hayat

Each year the Branford Boase award celebrates debut children’s authors and their editors. As it always does, this year’s shortlist showcases a great selection of new fiction and narrowing the finalists to one will be a difficult process.

We invited all the shortlisted authors and their editors to answer a few questions about their books which we hope readers of all ages will find interesting. Below you will find Janeen Hayat’s answers about her book Evie and Maryam’s Family Tree…

Congratulations! The Branford Boase shortlist has featured many popular authors as they started out. What does it mean to make this shortlist?

It’s incredibly humbling to look back at the books that have been shortlisted and see the amazing careers those authors have had since. There are so many fantastic books published every year, and if you’re not a celebrity there’s this fear that no one will actually find your book. This shortlist is such an opportunity to be elevated.

Lots of librarians use this list to host book clubs in their schools, what would you love young readers to take from your book?

Behind the big concepts like colonialism, race, and class are actual people. One thing I’d like young people to take from Evie and Maryam’s Family Tree is that it’s in their power to reach beyond their set groups and make unexpected friendships. It takes a lot of bravery, but it’s usually worth it – and it’s a message I think us adults could benefit from just as much.

The Branford Boase celebrates debut fiction, where did the idea for your book come from, how long did it take from idea to holding your book, and did your book turn out how you thought it might when you started?

Technically, it took a little over two years, but isn’t every first novel sort of in the making for the author’s whole life? Mine was! Many of the social dynamics in the school came from my own experience, which I saw being replicated in my kids’ school – cliques of parents filtering into cliques of kids. In reality, a multicultural school is often a siloed place.

The book I was going to write was just about that. But, once I’d started writing it, my Dad began telling my brother and I more about his childhood in Pakistan (he was born the year before Partition), and I had this realisation that there’s so much of our family histories that we don’t know. And because of that, our cliques are all surely more linked than we realise. We tend to socialise with people we think are like us, so would have no idea if, say, my grandmother was actually friends with my neighbour’s grandmother when they were young.

Many readers of Evie and Maryam’s Family Tree will be students between 8 – 13 years old (some are slightly older ahem). What book do you remember reading at that time that has stuck with you into adulthood?

Judy Blume had a huge impact on me as an adolescent – I especially loved Blubber and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Those books got the social world of the school so right, and treated all of those big emotions you feel over friendships at that age seriously. Judy Blume also wasn’t scared to take on topics that were awkward to talk about with your parents – periods, feeling uncomfortable in your own body, crushes – so I found them so valuable (even though menstrual belts were long gone by the time I was reading!).

We’d love to know: the Worst Bit, the Best Bit and a Random Rest (not positive or negative, just interesting) bit about writing a book for young people like Evie and Maryam’s Family Tree.

The Worst Bit was definitely reading my book for about the 40th time in the final copy edits. There were a couple of typos in the first print run – probably because my brain was just broken by that point.

The Best Bit couldn’t be anything other than going to the bookshop with my kids and seeing Evie and Maryam on the shelf for the first time. We were all so excited, and it was really special to share that moment with them – and then celebrate with a usually forbidden mall snack.

My favourite of the Random Rest was asking my Dad and his octogenarian friends for advice on how to write a realistic 1930s Delhi flat based on what they’d heard from their parents. What followed was a two-hour unleashing of random anecdotes that were pretty useless for the book, but a very interesting way to spend a morning.

Many thanks to Janeen for answering our questions about her debut novel Evie and Maryam’s Family Tree. You can find out more about this book below and catch up with the whole Branford Boase shortlist books on our Book Awards page here.

Evie and Maryam’s Family Tree

Janeen Hayat ISBN: 9781916558410

Two girls are thrown together for a school project and discover that their great-grandmother’s knew each other when they both lived in Pakistan in the 1930s.

Evie and Maryam are in the same class at school, uneasily thrown together at the start of a new term as they start a project together looking into their family trees.

The two girls don’t think they have much in common – Maryam feels like an outsider school with the other girls whose parents all seem to know each other, and Evie thinks Maryam is a bit odd. But when the two girls each find the same mysterious folder containing documents in a secret language that belong to their grandmothers, they discover their ties go back two generations, all the way to India, to partition, and to two best friends who inspired each other more than they ever know.

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