The Children's Author

At age seven, I declared myself a feminist at the dinner table in front of a room full of guests. At eleven, I was convinced baking and selling biscuits for Greenpeace would help save the world. And at fifteen, I went on my first ever anti-war protest march past Parliament.

Wanting to get up in the face of perceived wrongs has always been a huge part of me. Just as wanting to be an author was. I realised the power of stories from the moment I read Matilda, ran home, locked myself in my bedroom, and spent three hours trying to move a pencil with my eyes. Or whenever I opened wardrobes at aunts’ houses hoping Narnia would be found. Or when I re-read Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince or The Selfish Giant again and again (and again!) and cried again and again (and again!). Or ran away after school to find a horse to help after reading Black Beauty…

It will come as no surprise then, that the books I choose to write for children centre on the issues that matter most to me, and which I know matter to them too.

Onjali's Refugee Aid Team works to raise goods, funds, and awareness on behalf of projects that work hard to aid refugees.

My first book, The Boy at the Back of the Class, focuses on the refugee crisis from the perspective of a child in the UK, who wants to befriend a new refugee boy. It was inspired by the hundreds of child refugees I have met since 2015, when I began delivering aid convoys to the refugee ‘camps’ of Calais, Dunkirk and Grand-Synthe in France. I founded O’s Refugee Aid Team (ORAT) formally in 2018, and continue to deliver aid and funds for partnering frontline refugee aid responders in northern France and Greece – whilst also lobbying the UK government and others for the recognition of more humane refugee laws and treatment.

My second book, The Star Outside My Window, hones in on the devastating impacts of ‘Domestic’ Violence on a girl called Aniyah and her little brother Noah. Sadly, it’s a topic that rings close to home, having experienced the anger and deep disbelief of having a beloved aunt murdered by a man she was trying to divorce in 2012. Learning of the epic failures by all the agencies involved in her case, I set up a grassroots organisation, Making Herstory. Through it, we work to mobilise people from all walks of life to help end the daily abuses of, and violence perpetrated against, women and girls; raise goods for women’s refuges and services, and lobby the government to recognise and safeguard the basic rights of women.

The books that have since followed include The Night Bus Hero, which centres on homelessness as perceived by a bully called Hector, and The Great Food Bank Heist, which hits on the unacceptable realities of children struggling with food poverty. My latest story, The Lion Above the Door, centres on racisms, both historical and present, in relation to World War II, and will be due for release in October 2021.

Onjali's books seek to be a voice for those who need to be recognised, heard, and respected.

I am of the Muslim faith (as is visible by my very visible headscarves). And my faith is bone-deep: it forges the foundation to every facet of my life and works, my understanding of justice, equality and duty, and what I want to do in the very short time I have here on this earth. 

From Mary to Moses, from Adam and Abraham to Muhammad, the teachings exemplified by the emblems and prophets of my faith, all help me in coping daily with my anger and frustrations at not just human rights violations happening, but my own limitations and failures. I wouldn’t be able to bear the stories or struggles I see and hear daily, if I didn’t know that God’s love and justice is not only promised, but given, and something all of us are called on to give and strive for, in return.

Onjali (right) at the 'Welcoming the Stranger' roundtable with Canon Sarah Snyder (second from right) and UNHCR Representative to the UK Rosella Pagliuchi Lor (second from left).

The UNHCR and Rose Castle Foundation roundtable was timely in the midst of so much heartache around what is currently happening in Afghanistan and to refugees in all parts of our world. The reminder of just how prevalent the message of dispelling one’s own fears to welcome someone unknown is, across all faiths, was sorely needed. I knew that message was existent across all faiths before the roundtable. But being reminded of the depth of it was striking, and I left the table with renewed hopes of unified works.

Right now, I would call on everyone reading these words to do whatever it is within your power to stop the new Nationality and Borders Bill being passed. The UNHCR UK have hit back on what is a clear attempt to wipe out basic humanitarian laws, and declared it to be in breach just this past week. To criminalise human beings for daring to flee un-survivable climates and to threaten them with imprisonment, is a flouting of every basic human, sacred law we should be safeguarding.

So tweet, email, put pen to paper - our MPs need to recognise that no-one leaves behind their beautiful lands and ancestries for anything save their lives.