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The Diverse BookshelfAuthor: Samia Aziz
Welcome to The Diverse Bookshelf. Im Samia Aziz, celebrating the power of literature and the voices of authors and change makers from the global majority. Join me as we explore the stories that inspire, connect, and transform our world. Each week I interview an inspiring guest about a whole host of themes and issues while focusing on diverse literature. Lets uncover the stories that truly mattertogether. Language: en-gb Genres: Arts, Books, Education Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Hala Alyan on baby loss, healing & the waiting that never ends
Episode 113
Monday, 1 December, 2025
Today, I’m so honoured to welcome Hala Alyan to the podcast. Hala is an award-winning Palestinian American writer, poet, and clinical psychologist whose work has long explored the intimate spaces between memory, home, displacement, and the inner worlds we navigate. Many readers know her through her poetry and her acclaimed novels Salt Houses and The Arsonists’ City, but her latest book, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, brings us into an even more intimate landscape. Structured in twelve chapters - each corresponding to a month of pregnancy — the memoir unfolds at the pace of a body hoping, fearing, changing, and remembering.In this conversation, we explore how Hala writes about belonging, grief, and the complicated terrain of family and identity. We also spend time with the memoir’s deeply personal themes: infertility, baby loss, and the ways these experiences reshape identity and belonging - how they alter one’s relationship to the body, to lineage, and to the idea of home. Hala writes with remarkable honesty about her struggle with alcohol addiction and the difficult, courageous work of recovery, and she is equally candid about the complexities of marriage: the tensions, the ruptures, and the quiet forms of repair that make long-term partnership both challenging and deeply human.We also reflect on the past two years, and how this moment for Palestine — the grief, the witnessing, the insistence on remembering - has shaped her understanding of heritage, responsibility, and where we locate ourselves in times of collective pain.It’s a thoughtful, layered, and profoundly honest conversation, and I’m truly grateful to share it with you.Support the show
