Kerry Drewery asks why there is an Iraq shaped void in teen and YA fiction and calls for more teen and YA books to be set in the Middle East to help young people understand the complexities of conflict

Many people have asked why I chose to set a YA novel in Iraq, and especially why at the time of the 2003 invasion. It was never a contrived decision in order to write politically, or to force my opinions onto others; the initial reason was to try and make sense of my own feelings about why we were being taken to war and explore whether I agreed with it or not. Simply put – I didn’t understand it, and wanted to.



I listened to the arguments for intervention, the arguments against, before finally coming to the decision that although, without doubt, everyone’s opinion is important, more important were the opinions of the Iraqi people themselves. They would be the ones having their homes bombed, their futures threatened, their lives disrupted, not me sitting in my comfortable home with my husband who would still be going to work and children who would still be going to school.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kerry Drewery: Lina was born in my head, with all her plans for an exciting future suddenly thrown to the wind on bombs. Photograph: PR

Naively I set myself on a mission to establish the opinions of the normal, everyday Iraqi, but reading blogs by teenage girls, young men, husbands and wives, or articles by politicians, intellectuals and historians, it soon became clear, of course, that their opinions were as wide and varied as ours!

This became the focus of my novel A Brighter Fear for me – having a character living it, with conflicting views herself and opinions around her, would not only give a more accurate picture of life amongst war and the very complex issues it brings, but allow the reader to empathise better with the character and her situation, and explore the conflict through reading. And so Lina was born in my head, with all her plans for an exciting future filled with university and friends, suddenly thrown to the wind on bombs.

The research itself was quite daunting – it was impossible for me to visit Iraq – and so as well as watching many, many documentaries, news stories, Youtube clips of the country, reading blogs, visiting countless websites, I turned to books and read non-fiction from a variety of sources to ensure my viewpoint was as wide as it could be, including, The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell – John Crawford (US soldier stationed in Baghdad), A Hundred and One Days – Asne Seierstadt, (Norwegian freelance journalist in Baghdad), In Search of Iraq by Richard Downes (Irish reporter for RTE), Mayada, Daughter of Iraq by Jean Sasson (true story of a jailed Iraqi woman).



Yet I was surprised to find only one YA novel set in Iraq – Kiss the Dust by Elizabeth Laird – although only initially set in Kurdistan during the first Gulf war and more refugee story than focussed on conflict.



Still now, 11 years after the invasion of Iraq, I’m not aware of any others, and only know of one in any Middle Eastern conflict (Elizabeth Laird again with A Little Piece of Ground (set in Palestine). This seems such a shame and such a missed opportunity, not for sales or to fill a gap in the market, but to bring these situations to the fore, explore them through literature and so help them be understood. Fear often comes from not understanding or misunderstanding – “knowledge is power” a teen told me at a school visit in Nottingham recently.



Few, even “grown-ups”, want to spend their free time reading about how Iraq arrived at that situation in 2003 (or the situation now with ISIS), or what it was like living under Saddam Hussein’s regime, or indeed look further afield and question why Syrian fighters want to oust their leader, or even ponder on what is going on in Iran and if they really do stone women to death, yet a novel can explore this – it can entertain, inform and educate its reader while they turn the page to discover if the character they’ve invested in lives or dies, discovers the truth, fights for justice, or falls in love.



Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch: “You never really understand a person… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it”. Photograph: Universal Pictures/Getty Images

In To Kill a Mockingbird Atticus Finch states – “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it”. Fiction lets the reader do this, lets them see the pain, the determination, the sorrow, the bombs, the families and the friendships, lets them make up their own minds and form their own opinions.

As an adult I read Michael Morpurgo’s Private Peaceful and felt I understood the plight of a soldier more, Mal Peet’s Tamar and could empathise with WWII spies, Michael Williams’ Now is the Time for Running and could relate to life in Zimbabwe.



Then what a shame that Iraq, the Middle East, and Middle Eastern conflicts in general is such a void in YA fiction. Why? Is it a taboo subject? Are people weary of hearing it on the news? Would it not sell? A bit of all of the above, I think.



Someone once said to me, “Why would anyone want to read about them, when they keep coming over here and killing us?”

I recoiled a little. Perhaps a statement made from misunderstanding. Who is the “they” in all this?



I don’t think any other medium has the power to explore situations as books can (film may come a close second, but a book slows you down to think and encourages you to imagine yourself there) and YA fiction does this even more so.



We are awash with teen novels set in the world wars, they seem as popular as ever and have explored the conflict and situation excellently with such as The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein, yet the problems in the Middle East aren’t going away, and have barely been touched.



YA novels open up worlds to minds still forming opinions, nurture understanding and empathy through character and story – I wish we could see more exploring the very difficult and complex situations in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East and looking at the people who live, and struggle, through them.



Kerry Drewery’s books A Brighter Fear (set in Baghdad) and A Dream of Lights (set in North Korea) are available at the Guardian bookshop.



Would you like to see more books exploring conflict and complex political situations? Or do you have some to recommend? Let us know by emailing childrens.books@theguardian.com on share on Twitter @GdnchildrensBks. Are you under 18, love reading and not a member of the Guardian children’s books site? Come on in, the water’s fine!