I wanted to write the most exciting, action-packed adventure story I could imagine: a book that would grip readers from its very first page.  But at the same time, I also wanted it to be a book that would stay with readers long after they’d finished it, filling their minds with big questions and ideas.

Tyger is set in London, in the present day, but in a strange alternate world – a world where the British Empire has never ended, slavery has never been abolished, and almost all animals are extinct.  Yet it’s in this world that a boy called Adam and a girl called Zadie find the mysterious, mythical, magical animal known as Tyger.

It took me 9 years to write this book: draft after draft, until it was the very best version of the story I could imagine.  It changed enormously in that time.

From the very first draft, it was always a story about a boy, a girl and a tyger, set in an alternate world.  But it wasn’t always the alternate world it ended up being.  It wasn’t always set in London.  It wasn’t even this particular boy or girl!  All of that changed and more.  My stories always do as I work on them.

The first inspiration was William Blake’s great poem The Tyger, which I remember a teacher reading to us when I was at school.  “Tyger Tyger burning bright” – I was mesmerised by those lines.  It became my favourite poem.  And many years later, as I began to write my own Tyger, I found myself reading all of Blake’s other work, and reading about his life.  Many of the things I learned inspired the world of my book.

Other big inspirations include Malorie Blackman’s Noughts & Crosses and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: amazing stories that take us to other worlds with alternate histories. Tyger couldn’t exist without them.

Adam was the most difficult character to write, because he’s so much like me.  He’s a Muslim boy whose family came originally from the Middle East, though he’s always lived in London and thinks of himself as a Londoner, just like me.  Many of the things’ people say to him in the book are things people have said to me.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked: “Where are you from?  No, where are you really from?”

It wasn’t easy writing about such experiences so directly.  But I felt it was important to put them in a book, and write about them truthfully.

One of my motivations for writing Tyger was to write an exciting adventure story with main characters who happen to be Muslim, as Adam and Zadie are.  I was trying to write a book that I wish had existed when I was a child.

But there are characters of all sorts of beliefs and identities in Tyger, because I wanted to make space for all readers to imagine themselves in the story, to see themselves reflected or to enter other points of view.  I hope children of all backgrounds might read Tyger and come away feeling that whoever you are, there is no limit to what you can dream and what you can do.

From Varjak Paw on, I’ve been amazed and inspired to see the work that teachers have done when reading my books with their classes.  And I know my books work when read aloud as well as on the page, because I read them out while writing them!

The most important thing for me is the sheer enjoyment factor, because we know reading for pleasure is life-changing.  But of course there are all kinds of conversations and activities a book can lead you into.  I hope Tyger might give readers ways of thinking about questions of identity, difference and belonging, and I hope it might help them think about the history of our world, and how things might be different.

Thank you so much, I love them too!  Every time I open out the cover in front of a class, they always gasp to see the tyger come alive!  I’m incredibly lucky to work with the brilliant Dave McKean, who’s illustrated all my books.  He does things with art that could never be done with words alone, and I think his work in Tyger is some of the best he’s ever done.

SF Said’s Tyger is worth the 9 year wait!  An incredible adventure with heroes you desperately hope will prevail that will make readers think.  Find out more about Tyger or any of SF Said’s other classroom favourites by clicking by clicking the images below.

We’d like to thank SF for answering our questions.