Onjali Rauf: ‘My mother said publishing was a white world, but I should always try’
The author’s debut children’s novel was an instant bestseller. She talks about tackling issues such as the refugee crisis in children’s fiction – and the shocking crime in her family that changed everything
Onjali Rauf was recovering from a life-saving operation when the idea for her first book came to her. A few months earlier, the 38-year-old Londoner had been in the Calais refugee camps with the anti-trafficking and domestic violence charity she had founded. There she met Zainab, a Syrian refugee who was eight months pregnant yet having to scavenge through bins for food. Rauf tried to raise the money needed for Zainab to give birth in hospital, but in the end there was no time – the baby arrived early. “His name was Raehan – a gorgeous little baby,” Rauf recalls, smiling.
While convalescing, Rauf could not stop thinking about the women in the camp – and Raehan. She had not seen the mother and child again. “I started thinking about what it would be like for him to walk into a school one day,” she says. “Suddenly, an idea for a book title popped into my head: The Boy at the Back of the Class.”