This week I am thrilled to be interviewing author A.B. Kyazze, who will be sharing with us details of her writing life, telling us all about her new book ‘Into the Mouth of the Lion‘, which was released on 6th May 2021, and answering a few fun questions. This post contains affiliate links.

A.B. Kyazze is a British–American writer and photographer. She spent two decades writing and taking photographs around the world in conflicts and natural disasters – in Africa, Asia and the Balkans. Her photographs and non-fiction work have been published in travel magazines, The Huffington Post, The Washington Times, The International Review of the Red Cross, and by Oxfam, Save the Children, the British Red Cross, and the Humanitarian Practice Network of the Overseas Development Institute.

She also writes short stories and book reviews and teaches creative writing workshops for children. Today, she lives in southeast London with her young family. Into the Mouth of the Lion is her first novel, and was long-listed for the 2017 Mslexia Women’s First Novel Prize.

I loved writing as a child. When I was very young, my friends and I would invent plays and dramatic scenes from comics in order to act them out in front of the family. Later I started writing a daily journal and photographic scrapbook. Encouraged by very creative teachers, I started writing my own short stories from about the age of 10.

For my childhood, I would probably say picture books were my favourites, considering the zaniness of Maurice Sendak, and the hilarious wordplay in the poetry of Shel Silverstein. Later, I fell in love with the books of L.M. Montgomery, the author of the Anne of Green Gables books, and Madeleine L’Engle, the author of A Wrinkle in Time.

Then there was J.D. Sallinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and others that helped me see life from different perspectives. When I went to college, I discovered Toni Morrison and other American Southern writers, and I was inspired to keep going with literary creative writing.

It started as a short story about a plane ride, when I was working for Oxfam GB on a trip to Angola in 2002. As I explain in this blog post www.abkyazze.co.uk/can-you-remember the plane ride was so dramatic, and the landscape of war-torn Angola so compelling, that the story stayed with me for years. I continued working as a writer and photographer for different humanitarian organisations for almost two decades; at the same time I was building up to a time when I needed to start writing this novel and see where it might take me.

I am more of a “pants-er”, as I like to set the scene and then my characters lead a lot of the action and plot. I am constantly surprised by my characters, and sometimes have to re-write sections of the book depending on what they decide to do!

I juggle my creative writing, my photography, the writing business (marketing, networking, and my website) as well as a freelance copy editing business. So my days are quite varied, and no one is the same as the others. Over the course of a week, I try to write some morning pages first thing (just 3 pages free-writing, no pressure and fun) and then have some solid fiction writing sessions perhaps 3 times a week.

Sometimes this might be in a café on a Sunday, if I’m lucky. Twice during a normal week, I will fit in a run after dropping my daughter at school, and then sit down at my desk around 10 for a burst of work until 3, when I have to pick her up. Depending on the day’s activities, I will then get back to my desk either for a couple of hours before 6, or from about 8-11 pm. I try not to be on the computer after that, although I am a complete night owl. If I didn’t have family responsibilities, I would happily write into the early hours of the morning.

Where A.B. Kyazze Writes

I love to create. Creative writing gives me energy, and changes my whole mood. The best thing about being a published author is having people read my stories, and tell me what they think. Not everyone is a fan, but it is so gratifying to have my words out in the world, and to see that people can read different things into the scenes, landscapes and characters that I have created. Everyone has their own experience of my words. I love hearing from readers, and it keeps me inspired to keep writing!

The research was many years ago, when I was working for Oxfam in the field in 2002-4. Later, much later, I was taking night classes in creative writing and going back through my notebooks and photos from Angola, DR Congo, Sudan and other places. I had to filter through my experiences, which provided some rich material. But at the same time, I had to make sure that I was writing a novel that would be exciting to read, not a memoir or some kind of a political statement.

It took me about two years of writing, workshops and working with a mentor to go from initial idea to a good first draft. Then about 12-18 months were needed in intensive editing before it was ready to share with potential agents and publishers.

My book is sort of cross-genre; I call it a mystery and it definitely has suspense, but it is not a classic crime novel or thriller, I’d say. I wrote the kind of book I love to read: with an intriguing plot, flawed but interesting characters you care about, and a setting that takes you away somewhere. People have compared it to The Constant Gardener by John Le Caree or Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which are also books set in different African countries that don’t fit into an easy genre.

I needed it to be a name that would be chosen by a Portuguese mother with a strong Catholic background, but also one that could be shortened in different ways. I chose “Lena” as a shortened version of “Magdalena”, and her sister calls her “Mags”, much to Lena’s embarrassment. I thought that would show both the relationship to the mother’s background, and also the dynamics between the sisters.

Essentially, Lena is a young photographer out to find her missing sister. Lena is 24, a bit lost in her career, and without realising it, she really needs to connect to her purpose. Her sister DJ has been working for years abroad for humanitarian agencies, and has a conflicting relationship with their mother for various reasons which become clear in the book. Lena meets Kojo, the Ghanaian director of the humanitarian organisation, and DJ’s boss. He is a calm and measured man, a good leader, but has flaws as well, due to tragedies in his past.

Well, I worked quite hard in editing and submissions, so I was always trying to improve it. But once it was published and in people’s hands, I was really pleased. Every new author still has to fight back imposter syndrome, but no one can ever take away from me that I am now a published novelist, and readers have told me that my words have touched them. That is the best feeling in the world.

I love this quote from Goethe: “Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power in it.”

No.

I’m a trustee for a creative writing charity focused on fantasy (The Oxford Centre for Fantasy www.oxfordcentreforfantasy.org) and so lately I have been reading quite widely in fantasy, speculative fiction, and other books. I am reading Margaret Atwood’s The Testament, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. Over the holidays, I was completely immersed in The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak. It is a beautifully-written book about lovers and lives torn apart by the civil war and division in Cyprus in the 1970s. I highly recommend it.

Great question! I think I’d be another passenger on a precarious plane flight that takes place in chapter 2; it is a near-crash scene and sets in motion a lot of the plot. The plane is full of aid workers, shady characters and nuns. I’d make a great nun, I think.

I can think of quite a few I would not choose (Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel jumps to mind – although it is a truly brilliant book!) but to choose one where I could be for a day? Perhaps Tangier, the Moroccan setting of Christine Mangan’s book Tangerine. While it is a place with frightening corners and intrigue (and it is a murder mystery) I love Morocco and the atmosphere described in the book is really inviting.

Get a new chair! This one is a bit broken…. But it lets me see everything across your incredibly messy desk. You must have a creative mind!

A big thank you to A.B. Kyazze for sharing her writing life with us and a wonderful interview.