美国国家公共电台 NPR Former Journalist Sabaa Tahir Writes Dystopian Fantasies Inspired By The News

Former Journalist Sabaa Tahir Writes Dystopian Fantasies Inspired By The News 

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If you've wandered into the young adult section of a bookstore or a movie theater recently, you might have wondered, just how many dystopian fantasies does the world really need? "The Hunger Games" apparently 2 fueled an appetite for stories about young people who kill each other in made-up militarized societies.

A new book out this week continues this literary trend. It's called "A Torch Against The Night." NPR's Neda Ulaby has the story of how Sabaa Tahir went from editing news at The Washington Post to writing fiction for young adults.

NEDA ULABY, BYLINE 3: It started at her desk when she was handed a haunting news story about women in India whose husbands, sons and brothers had been disappeared by state police.

SABAA TAHIR: And it's not always clear what the charges are. And a lot of these women never find out what's happened to their family member. They're just gone.

ULABY: Sabaa Tahir could not shake the story out of her head.

TAHIR: I edited that story that night. And I remember walking through the Post garage and thinking about it. I was thinking about my own brothers. I'm very close to them - and the idea that I could live in a place where they could just be taken.

ULABY: So it was cathartic 4 to go home and start writing a fictional 5 story about a girl with black hair and golden eyes whose brother is similarly disappeared. Tahir connected to this news story partly because it was filed in Kashmir, near Pakistan, where her family's originally from.

TAHIR: You know, where through, maybe, any twist of fate I could have potentially grown up there.

ULABY: The story became Sabaa Tahir's first novel. "An Ember In The Ashes" was an immediate 6 best-seller. Paramount 7 Pictures bought the movie rights before it was even published. Critics compared it to "The Hunger Games" mixed with "Game Of Thrones."

MARIE RUTKOSKI: I think that "An Ember In The Ashes" is really its own thing.

ULABY: That's Marie Rutkoski. She's an English professor who also writes young-adult fiction. And she reviewed Sabaa Tahir's first book. Unlike in "The Hunger Games," she says, Tahir writes from multiple points of view, showing empathy even with a merciless headmistress of an elite 8 military school.

RUTKOSKI: It felt so strange to be able to see from her perspective because she is so horrible.

RUTKOSKI: And Rutkoski also appreciated the rich, dense 9 layers of a fantasy world that borrows from ancient Sparta, Bedouin culture and the loneliness of the author's own California childhood.

TAHIR: I grew up in this really isolated 10 town in the Mojave Desert. My parents had a motel.

ULABY: With 18 rooms and a pool, they didn't always fill.

TAHIR: It was built out of big cinder 11 blocks, painted over white.

ULABY: Even though the motel was located near a bustling 12 military base, it was not the financial success her parents had hoped for.

TAHIR: Flipping 13 the no vacancy 14 sign was always a really huge deal because it happens so rarely.

ULABY: Tahir says hers was not an easy childhood. She spent lots of time getting lost in her brother's comic books.

TAHIR: I didn't fit in because I looked different from everybody else. And my family didn't fit in. You know, I heard people call them names or tell them to go back. And that was from a very young age.

ULABY: But Tahir says feeling different helped form her as a writer. She stopped working for The Washington Post seven years ago partly to focus on fiction. Growing up in a motel, she says, meant exposure to a parade of characters passing through.

TAHIR: You know, crazy people, weird 15 people, interesting people - there was this one guy who kept birds. And I remember that he wanted to pay us with a bird. And when he left, he gave us a parakeet.

ULABY: For the fantastical characters in her books, Tahir also drew on elements of folktales she heard growing up, like the supernatural beings called Jinn, spirits common to Muslim mythology 16 in South Asia and the Middle East.

TAHIR: And, you know, my mom told me stories about Jinn. She said that they lived in trees. And they have really bright eyes. That's something that made it into the book. That they have freewill - they can be good, or they can be evil.

ULABY: Reading fantasy and dystopian novels now, Tahir says, is not an escape for readers. Maybe it's a way to understand real parts of the world that many of us, through a twist of fate, are lucky enough not to live in. Neda Ulaby, NPR News.