SAARA EL-ARIFI

Reimagining fantasy: meet one of the brightest new stars in the genre 

-  Jonathan Wright

THE WAY FORWARD, SAARA EL-ARIFI DECIDED, was to risk failing big. So it was that, as an unpublished novelist, she submitted to an agent she calls “the biggest dealmaker in Europe”, Juliet Mushens. It paid off. “I think she gets 700 queries a week, but she came back to me in 10 minutes and said, ‘Can I have the whole manuscript?’”

Life since has been a “whirlwind”, partly set in motion by El-Arifi’s own fierce work ethic. Her third novel Faebound, the opening volume in a new trilogy, follows swiftly on the heels of two instalments in her Ending Fire trilogy. “My ambition is unparalleled,” she tells SFX and, while she’s more than self aware enough to deliver this line in a self-deprecating way, there’s clearly a grain of truth in it.

So why did her debut The Final Strife attract so much attention? At least in part, she says, it was because, after 14 years of trying to get published, she questioned why she’d been writing a book “where the main character was a white man”. Looking around on the Tube one day, she realised that her bookshelves, filled with fantasy novels, didn’t reflect London’s diversity. “My superpower is being black,” she says, “and I didn’t know that. When I actually sat down and wrote the novel that I should have been writing from the very start, I wrote it in four months.”

While, she says, The Final Strife deals with “black pain”,