{"id":97798,"date":"2025-08-28T03:32:04","date_gmt":"2025-08-28T03:32:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/97798\/"},"modified":"2025-08-28T03:32:04","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T03:32:04","slug":"we-chat-to-palestinian-writer-and-the-coin-author-yasmin-zaher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/97798\/","title":{"rendered":"We Chat To Palestinian Writer And The Coin Author Yasmin Zaher"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dylan Thomas prize-winning writer Yasmin Zaher is quickly making a name for herself in the literary world. And with her upcoming event at the Chelsea Arts Festival<\/a> this September \u2013 where she will be in conversation with the internet\u2019s resident librarian Jack Edwards<\/a> \u2013 we can\u2019t wait to see what she will do next. Following the success of her debut novel The Coin, Belinda Bamber chats to the Palestinian writer about\u00a0literary, political and sexual freedoms.<\/p>\n

C&TH Book Club: The Coin By Yasmin Zaher<\/p>\n

What is \u2018The Coin\u2019 of the title? <\/p>\n

The narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman who moves to NYC<\/a> in search of reinvention and the American dream. On arrival, she remembers swallowing a coin as a child, and becomes convinced it is still stuck in her body, driving her strange, compulsive behaviour. Gradually, it becomes a symbol of her childhood and trauma, infiltrating all aspects of her new life: love, sex, money, debt and her work as a teacher. As I was writing, The Coin alchemised into a mystical novel, and I still find all kinds of riddles and surprises in it.<\/p>\n

Why is the narrator obsessed with cleansing rituals that never quite purify the \u2018rot\u2019 of her body beneath her McQueen dress? <\/p>\n

She goes through an existential transformation, from a put-together, purified, aesthetic persona to a human being moved by her animal nature. At the end she\u2019s mad, uncivilised and unkempt, but free of beauty and class.<\/p>\n

Did you enjoy creating this sweet-natured teacher with underlying American Psycho traits? <\/p>\n

It\u2019s a pleasure to write an unexpected, somewhat unhinged character, enacting some of our deepest, most repressed fantasies. The devotion of her lover, Sasha, doesn\u2019t satisfy her. What does she need to feel fulfilled? Self-acceptance, I think. Her cleaning, grooming and dressing is a form of self-loathing.<\/p>\n

How much of The Coin is based on your own life, given your childhood in Palestine? <\/p>\n

It came from deep places in my mind and soul, and in that respect it\u2019s very personal. But it\u2019s not biographical. It\u2019s as if my life was the paint and I painted a picture of another life with it.<\/p>\n

There are some hilariously sardonic lines. Would you describe yourself as a satirist? <\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know how I managed to write these funny lines. I\u2019m trying to do it again in my second novel and it\u2019s a total failure. There\u2019s a kind of private freedom in writing your first novel that allowed me to take risks and write outrageous politically incorrect things.<\/p>\n

Is humour a defence against expectations of you as a \u2018Palestinian writer\u2019? <\/p>\n

There are a lot of expectations on \u2018identity\u2019 writers. I didn\u2019t do it consciously, but looking back I was probably trying to fight my way out of the boxes. The Palestinian narrator of this novel is free, rich, sexually liberated, and above all, not a victim \u2013 she\u2019s even somewhat of a perpetrator. She\u2019s not that good or moral. There is something humanising about not being perfect.<\/p>\n

Your influences include Vonnegut, Houellebecq and Millet. What links them?<\/p>\n

They\u2019re all free. Reading is liberatory; it can transform you. I wasn\u2019t the same person after reading Kurt Vonnegut aged 15, or Catherine Millet\u2019s The Sexual Life of Catherine M., where she describes having group sex in the back of a truck. In my 20s I related deeply to Houellebecq characters who had awful thoughts about Arabs like me. It made me more open-minded.<\/p>\n

Congrats on winning the 2025 Dylan Thomas prize. Did you celebrate at McQueen? <\/p>\n

Interestingly, I lost all my desire for luxury and fashion in the process of writing this book, as if I\u2019d purged it. It downgraded my personal style!<\/p>\n

Favourite London haunts? <\/p>\n

A second-hand bookshop called Skoob, in Bloomsbury. London is also the best city in the west for Arab food.<\/p>\n

Discover Yasmin Zaher At The Chelsea Arts Festival<\/p>\n

Yasmin Zaher is at Chelsea Arts Festival on 20 September in conversation with internet star Jack Edwards (chelseaartsfestival.com<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The Coin by Yasmin Zaher (\u00a314.99, Footnote Press)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dylan Thomas prize-winning writer Yasmin Zaher is quickly making a name for herself in the literary world. And…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":97799,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[457,96,56,54,55,4667],"class_list":["post-97798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-what"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97798\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}