I recently had the amazing honour of interviewing Somaiya Daud, author of Mirage and its stunning sequel Court of Lions. I loved reading this duology so much, and I highly recommend you add it to your shelf if you’re a big fan of court intrigue and some kickass female protagonists.
In the interview, we chat about the sequel, inspiration, food, and much more!
Somaiya, can you tell us about yourself, and about Court of Lions, the sequel to Mirage?
Hello! I am a recent PhD graduate and currently write and teach at a local university. Court of Lions takes up with the characters of Mirage a few weeks after the events of the first book, and follows both Amani and Maram as they try to navigate an increasingly volatile political atmosphere with the rebels on the rise, and the King’s expectation of absolute loyalty to the Vath. There’s romance and court politics and a poetry salon! All extremely fun!
I’ve seen some authors on Twitter or Instagram show notes on how they keep track of characters and relationships. Do you do something similar when you write, or how do you track characters within your books?
I always block out the relationships and character arcs at the outlining stage, and from there things just sort of develop naturally. Once I’ve nailed a character’s history and key motivations, there’s only so many ways they can react to plot things, and in that sense it’s pretty easy to keep track of everything. I’m also a writer who only writes in order so I’m never really compensating for that, which is nice. I do have character codices with family background, family crest, and how its tied to the world map—that sort of thing. Keeping whose house had what colors and what their crests were got difficult in Court of Lions because there are more of them and they play significant roles!
I loved the poetry found within both of your books. What were they inspired by?
All of the poetry excepting the scripture and what Amani drafts in Mirage is actually real poetry written in the early modern and medieval eras by Arab poets. It felt really important when I was building out the world of Mirage to consider the literary culture and since I was basing Andala’s conquered court culture on medieval Arab court cultures it felt necessary for me not to default to the novel which is a Western literary form and instead on what would have been privileged in those spaces. I was writing Mirage while I was studying translation theory for my dissertation, and ended up reading a lot of books about the literary culture of the Arab middle ages—the Golden Age culturally—and it really helped to shape and inform both how poetry appeared as a world building tool, and my own translation practice.
I noticed that there has been a cover change between Mirage and Court of Lions. Will Mirage be getting its cover changed to match?
Yes! The Mirage paperback has gotten a similar look, with Amani’s face front and center. It released July 7 of this year.
I noticed that Amani is a bit of a cook, and wanted to know what your favorite food is? Is there a comfort food you reach for anytime you’re down?
This is a huge difference between Amani and I, haha. I hate cooking, even though I love to eat my mother’s food. But I always look forward to going home because my mom can make all the traditional and complicated Moroccan dishes. (the one time I attempted to make cous cous it looked like cream of wheat, whoops!) But my favorite is a very simple msemin bread—it’s a flaky flatbread, and I love it smeared in butter and honey.
What was your process like between writing Mirage and Court of Lions? Were there ways that the sequel was easier or harder while writing?
The sequel was definitely harder! For me the aim with fantasy is that the world should always grow from book to book. So in Mirage Amani’s world is really small—she sees Idris and Maram and Nadine, and interacts with Maram’s half-sister and her court only once. So when sitting down to write Court of Lions it was really important that the reader get to experience a wider and richer world, especially because that would help bring the rebellion to life and the epicentre of change would be similarly represented. That meant more locations, a bigger cast of characters with varied histories, and a lot more interpersonal strife. The first drafts of the book I could see the relationships taking shape, but I really needed help to flesh them out and to not get lost in the web of what I was trying to build, so my editor Kate Sullivan was a huge help on this. Amani has two primary relationships in Mirage and with Court of Lions I wanted the reader to watch her grow in an environment that in the ordinary course of her life she never would have expected to have been in, so that was fun, but again a challenge. Sometimes I felt like I was red yarning all the relationships and subplots, and then Kate would come in and help me simplify and streamline everything.
I’m obsessed with the descriptions of clothing in your book. Please tell me you have a Pinterest board with inspiration hidden somewhere!?
I do! And it’s not hidden, it’s on my pinterest page. I spend ages looking at pictures of jewelry and qaftans, and for a while I followed something like twenty Moroccan ateliers just to see both what the very traditional qaftans looked like and what more avante-garde designers were doing with silhouette and layers. I also, when I’m writing, basically forget every color, so looking at a wide range of fashion with really rich color palettes helped me a lot!
Are you currently working on any projects that you can share with our readers?
I’m always working on something, haha—I don’t really know how to be idle. I can’t really say much about what’s in the pipeline, but you can rely on me to keep writing space fantasy and court politics—those are my first and forever loves of writing!
Can you share a couple of things that have helped you get through this unprecedented time?
I’ve kept busy, which I know not everyone can do and is also not really helpful to everyone! I’ve taken up drawing as a hobby where I will let myself fail and feel good about successes, which is a really difficult thing for a type-A personality like mine but has been actually really therapeutic and soothing. I’ve always been an over achiever so the idea of failure makes me want to yeet myself into the sun. But the art is for no one but myself and in that way has been really nice—at the end of the day I put on Bob’s Burgers, and either pull out my sketchpad or an iPad and for the last couple hours of the day. I think anything that is engaging a part of your brain that isn’t work oriented and is just for you and is about you feeling good and satisfied is nice.
With so many authors having to go virtual for their book releases, what are some ways that we can support you when Court of Lions is released?
You can order Court of Lions from your local indie, or through bookshop.org! Pre-ordering is always really great, and if you check my Instagram and Twitter I’ll be announcing virtual events to celebrate its launch!
