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The Kingdom over the Sea was the first book I ever wrote, and I think what drew me to writing it foremost was wanting to try lots of different things – I wanted to write about periods of history that fascinated me like the golden age of the Islamic world, about my own family history, about magic and mountains and the northern lights…I had a lot of ideas when I started, and a lot that needed to be filtered out before I could turn it into a book! I think the twin ideas which really drew me in, and which kept me writing even when things got difficult, were of a grand city with palaces and libraries, and sorcerers who used poetry as magic – and then the destruction of those libraries, and the displacement of the sorcerers, and how they survived that.

The character of Yara took a while to emerge, but I knew she would be our eyes as a reader: first overwhelmed by the grandeur of Zehaira, and then propelling the story forward in her determination to seek out a sorceress. But eventually I was drawn to her as a combination of my two younger sisters. I wrote a lot of Kingdom during the second and third lockdown, when my sisters were both away at university, and I didn’t see them for long stretches of time. Writing Yara was like spending time with them, in a way.

The Kingdom over the Sea was written fairly quickly, mainly because it was lockdown and as a recent graduate I had nothing else to do. I started it at the beginning of September 2020, it was mostly done by January and the first draft finished by March. I then spent another year and a half editing it though, first with my mentor Aisha Bushby, then with my agent and then with my editors. When I wrote The City beyond the Stars I was on a tighter schedule – I started at the end of September and handed it in early January, and I had about nine months to edit it.

I think the life experience I really drew on was learning – about the world, about my family, about how things work. Yara does a lot of uncovering in both books, and most of it is about the things that have happened to the people around her, and why they happened, and how they can move forward. It’s an important journey that a lot of children go on when they’re growing up, and I tried to do it some justice when I was creating Yara’s journey. As for the world, there are definitely some places which I drew from memory, having visited cities like Zehaira and having studied in beautiful libraries. But a lot of the world isn’t built from experience, but research. I always try and emphasise that you don’t need to do a lot of travelling to build worlds as an author – there’s so much you can do sitting at your desk!

Yara is always the most difficult character to write, because she has to carry the plot on her shoulders and work things out, and still be believable and breathe like a human being. She has to go through devastating loss and still remain standing, instead of curling up into a ball like most people would do. She has to keep going when most people would turn around. She has to draw out the other characters without sounding too annoying. And amidst all that, she has to have her own personality, and her own flaws which trip her up when I’m trying to get her from Point A to Point B! When I first sold the book to my publishers, we spent quite a bit of time together trying to work out how Yara’s character could appear more on the page. I’m very proud of her character now!

The Kingdom over the Sea is very much a book of introductions – Yara keeps uncovering new places and new people, and new rules for how things work. That happens to a degree in City Beyond the Stars, but much less, and I think I had to work out how it should be structured, and how the story should flow, when I wasn’t doing quite so much worldbuilding as before. I also found ending a sequel far harder than ending the first book, as I knew this ending would have to conclude Yara’s arc in a really satisfying way. I hope I have done that! (I have heard that the ending has made a lot of people cry, which is always a good sign.)

There were lots of elements in The City Beyond the Stars that I thought about when writing The Kingdom over the Sea, and which made it in – the family dynamics, the ancient ruins, the power of storytelling. But I thought that it would be a book that was much more about the mechanism of story, when in fact it became a book about history – the stories we tell ourselves about history, how we reckon with what happened in the past, how our cultures change over time. The summer before I began writing The City beyond the Stars, I was doing my masters degree, and participating in these incredibly interesting seminars on the philosophy and ethics of cultural heritage. Somehow, a lot of the questions we discussed seemed to make their way into my book!

Perhaps the process of dealing with the events of the past? We’ve had a tumultuous past decade, and there are terrible things every night on the news – conflict and atrocities in Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine – that will be shaping history for decades to come. I hope the book’s engagement with the question of how we understand the past, and how we can come to terms with it, is relevant for younger readers.

I love this question! I always wondered about Yara’s reading tastes, and thought she probably made the most time for non-fiction, and books more grounded in reality. Maybe she would be more of a Jacqueline Wilson fan than a fantasy reader? But I think she would be pleased with the messages woven through this series.

I’m very proud of the ending, it took a long time to get right, and to me it feels like a really satisfying conclusion to Yara’s arc! So I suppose that means that I’m proudest of how Yara grows throughout the story, and how she transforms into the person she is at the end.

Also the ending. I hated saying goodbye to Yara and her friends, and maybe it was reluctance to do so that made it so difficult at first to see how Yara’s arc could end – even though I knew the second book was the right place to end her story. I hope one day I have the right idea, that could unlock new stories for Yara and all her friends.

That no matter how difficult it is, we all have to reckon with the past if we are to move forward. And, as in the first book – the only true test of our character is how we respond to those more vulnerable than ourselves, who need our help.

Zohra’s duology would suit class or school libraries for Key Stage 2 or Key Stage 3.  You can read more about the story by clicking on the images below.

We’d like to thank Zohra again for sharing her answers with us.