Samira Ahmed is celebrated for her genre-bending fiction, perfect for readers who love multiverse narratives, high-stakes twists, and boundary-pushing storytelling. In addition to writing, she dedicates her time to the Authors Against Book Bans, a group of writers, authors, illustrators, editors, and other book and literature creators working to end the rapid book banning in the United States. Her stories pulse with heart, intellect, and an undeniable love for the written word.

The Singular Life of Aria Patel has been described as genre-bending and multiverse-rich, with a dose of second-chance romance. What sparked the idea for this novel?

I have always been interested in the What If? questions in life—which grow as we age. I don’t see them as questions of regret but rather curiosity.

In college, I read Cliffor Geertz’s The Interpretations of Cultures where he wrote about the simple fact that every child is born with the chance to live a thousand different lives but we end up only living one—the paths we could have taken narrow as we grow older. Then in April 2019 I read “To Grieve is to Carry Another Time,” a brilliant, beautiful essay by Matthew Salesses about his wife’s passing and the relationship of his grief to time. This all got me thinking about memory as a time machine and our ability to tell stories (especially to ourselves) as a kind of ability to travel into different lives. Those strands of thought wove together into this story of a young woman, dealing with the loss of a beloved parent, who ends up lost in the multiverse where she has to contend with the lives that might have been hers. Young people exist in this liminal space between teen life and adulthood and in that space, they have many choices before them and many paths that may take. That is a space I explored through Aria’s journey.

Multiverse stories are no small task. What did you find challenging and what sort of ways did you organize your writing to work within this many-world structure?

This novel is both a multiverse story with a time loop in it. And the biggest challenge was making the physics seem possible—even if only very remotely so. I wrote a multiverse story in my Ms. Marvel run using what I call “Marvel physics,” which can be much more fantastical. But Aria exists in a grounded multiverse and because she herself is a scientist, I wanted her story to feel real, to allow readers to believe it could happen to them—to that end, I spoke with a couple scientists, read a lot of physics theory about time and the cold spot in our universe and why a multiverse could be real. I’m not a physicist, but I play one in my books.

I am a very linear writer, so I plotted the multiverses I wanted Aria to fall into—there had to be something in each universe that would allow Aria and the reader to learn together what was happening to her. And there had to be breadcrumbs in each of those universes that would help her along her journey.

Poetry plays a role in Aria’s journey, as does the recurring presence of Rohan. How did you approach blending romantic and philosophical elements across multiple timelines?

I think philosophy and love are deeply intertwined—even for young people, even for people experiencing the first embers of love. In fact, notions of the philosophy of love date back to Plato. Questions on the nature of love, defining love, understanding how love is tied to individual identity even as part of our individual identity may be sublimated when we fall in love—these are all questions that persist through time because love feels so essential to us, is essential, in so many ways. That’s the lens through which I created Aria’s relationship with Rohan. Is it a love that can endure anything—even across different universes or lifetimes?

It’s a question that Aria struggles with because she is a very science-driven young woman. She wants to believe that science has the answers for everything but where it doesn’t, perhaps poetry does.

Second-chance romance is such a beloved trope. What made you want to reimagine it through a speculative, multiverse lens?

Jane Austen’s Persuasion is the second-chance romance that first made me love this trope—and you might see some of Austen’s fingerprints in this speculative novel. In Aria, I talk about the notion of “personal gravity,”—a force tying you to a place or, perhaps, a person. And I wanted to explore that mysterious, electric force through a scientific lens. Why does Rohan keep appearing to Aria? Why is this poem a constant through time, what is it telling her? The multiverse lens is a vehicle for that exploration—it’s the time bomb trope that creates urgency to this second-chance romance. The multiverse also represents a literal second world second chance for Aria. Can she get it right, this time? Or was she right all along?

You’ve said before that writing YA gives you a way to speak to your younger self. What do you hope readers—especially teens—take away from Aria’s journey through parallel worlds?

The journey of self-discovery is the journey of a lifetime—I hope readers understand that, like Aria, they are always learning about themselves. That the journey is sometimes painful, marked by grief and hard choices, sacrifice but there is also beauty and love. All of those experiences—good, bad messy—make you the uniquely singular person you are. And that singular person, contains multitudes.

Many of your books center South Asian protagonists and complex female leads. How has your own experience shaped the stories you tell?

I’m often asked if my characters are versions of me—they’re not, I hope I’m creating characters that are uniquely themselves. But every character is informed by my own experiences, my world view. Growing up in an immigrant family, growing up in a small town with very, very little diversity, living in a country that so often claims to “celebrate” diversity when it routinely scapegoats “others” are all lenses through which I view the world and which influence my world building and character building. But there is also so much in my life that has given me reason to be hopeful—a million small moments of human connection, good fortune, wonder—and that hope is foundational to all my stories. I like to say I write the world as it is to imagine the world as it could be.

You’re known for genre versatility—from contemporary to speculative fiction. What draws you to these shifts in style, and where do your ideas begin?

I love writing in different genres because I love the different challenges each genre presents—whether it’s the painstaking research and timeline building for historical fiction or the verisimilitude needed in more speculative stories or the worldbuilding challenges of contemporary (yes, really!). The story of the revolutionary girl is the throughline present in all of my work and mixing up genres allows me to explore that theme through different lenses—it’s one way I can push myself as a writer and learn more about my craft.

As a leading voice in Authors Against Book Bans, you’ve been on the frontlines of this growing crisis. What do you see as the most urgent threat right now—and how can authors and readers fight back?

Book bans are deeply unconstitutional and anti-liberty. An attack on the freedom to read is an attack on our freedom to think, our freedom to make choices for ourselves—these are fundamental human rights. Bans are increasing at a frighteningly alarming rate and we see censorship being codified by local regulations, statewide legislation and national policy.

Bans are a heinous and insidious attempt to control human beings and to force an entire populace to view the world through a bigoted lens as most attacks are focused on books by BIPOC of LGBTQ+ creators. For these reasons, all of us need to be fighting this censorship. Authors and illustrators can work with Authors Against Book Bans as we support grassroots work at the local level, have strategic calls to action, support librarians and teachers and others on the front line of this fight.

All of us are readers, and we need to be taking up this issue at our local level—show up at school board and library board meetings to speak against bans, run for those boards, join local or state advocacy groups like the Freedom to Read projects or create your own.

Here are three easy things readers of this interview can do right now:

1. Call your Congresspeople and urge them to reverse the cuts to the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Here’s a script.

2. Get a library card. Yes, really! It’s a great way to show support.

3. If you are an author/illustrator/anthologist/book creator, join the 5000+ of us in Authors Against Book Bans. We are stronger together!

You’ve spoken passionately about the connection between book bans and systemic erasure. Why is it especially important for young readers to have access to stories like Aria Patel right now?

It has always been and will continue to be imperative for young people to be able to see themselves as the main character in a story and in their lives. As Dr. Rudine Sims Bishops wrote in 1990, when young readers can’t find themselves in stories or only see stereotypes, they learn that they are devalued by society, or erased. Our shelves should reflect our world and children deserve free and unfettered access to those shelves. As adults, it is our job to provide that for them, to ensure that for them.

How has your advocacy work influenced your writing—or vice versa?

For me, I don’t think it’s possible to separate the two. All art is political and in the United States, the lives of marginalized peoples—our very existence is politicized. My activism and my art stems from that and I’ve been aware of that politicization since I was quite young, since the first time I remember Islamophobic insults being hurled at me by grown men when I was seven years old. I want to believe that through my writing and through my advocacy work, I can help build a nation (and world) of the people, by the people and for the people where all people are at home, where all people are free.

With The Singular Life of Aria Patel releasing soon and the fight for free expression continuing, what’s next for you creatively or personally?

The work continues. We will not be silent or silenced. For me, personally, that means I will continue to write (I just turned in book #9) and I will continue to fight alongside thousands of other authors for our freedoms. Art shines a light on truth—that’s why authoritarians fear art. That’s why we’ve seen fascists regimes through history attack artists. Hitler did it and Stalin and Pinochet and we’re seeing it now, here, in the United States. There is no neutral—we must fight for art as art helps us become fully realized human beings.

What advice do you have for writers—especially women and writers of color—who want to tell bold stories in uncertain times?

Please continue to write and find your community of writers and artists—community is how we survive. To write well, you must write fearlessly and ferociously, so know that your stories are needed now, more than ever. Pick up your pen pen, face the blinking cursor on the blank page and tell your story in the way only you can write it.

The Singular Life of Aria Patel

Aria lives her life by the scientific method. If there is no clear procedure with defined variables, it is not worth the risk. This rationale is what led her to break up with her boyfriend, Rohan, before they went off to separate colleges. There were just too many variables in the experiment. But her logical world and way of thinking are knocked completely off center when she finds herself waking up in new realities every day. She is always Aria, but everything else is different. The only consistencies in each multiverse are Rohan and a poem from her English class. She knows she needs to find her way back to her reality so the Aria that lives in this one can have her life back, but she is starting to fall for this new life, her family’s new dynamic, and even this new version of Rohan.

Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes & Noble