Kamila Shamsie on headscarf politics and why Lionel Shriver is wrong about diversity

Kamila Shamsie pats her handbag and proudly declares that she has a £30,000 cheque in it. The novelist, aged 44, has just picked up her winnings for the Women’s Prize for Fiction — and she doesn’t know how she’ll spend the money yet. Her winning novel, Home Fire, riffs on Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone to tell the story of a Muslim family in London where a young man leaves to join Islamic State. Written in 2015 it anticipated Britain’s first Muslim Home Secretary, long before Sajid Javid was on the scene — leading to “Shamsie: Soothsayer?” trending on Twitter when he was appointed in April.

The UK suffered more deaths by terror attacks than any other European country last year, with a death toll of 36. Security services thwart one plot a month — the most recent being an all-female IS terror cell plotting to attack the British Museum.

“My first thought was not the British Museum — that’s my favourite place in the world,” says Shamsie, with dark humour. “IS was such an extreme thing that the idea of people from your world choosing to be part of that shocked people. It’s awful and I’d rather we didn’t have it but I also think we shouldn’t panic and ostracise entire communities. We need to trust that we have laws for dealing with terrorism, without subverting our own sense of civil liberty and justice.”

Can Javid do that? “Coming from a Muslim background, even though he is not practising, the concern is that if you aren’t hardline someone will think you are being soft on these people, so I expect he will be hardline. Theresa May was, so it won’t be a change.”

The revelation for her, researching Home Fire, was why people joined IS. “I assumed the draw was violence and wanting to feel powerful through that. But it was scarily more complex. Unlike other extremist groups they wanted to establish a state, so needed propaganda to appeal to doctors, engineers, to say come here, bring your family, we have a welfare state, we engage in animal conservation — literally, they had a zoo. It’s a mistake not to tell that story.”

She’s thrilled that Home Fire is being taught in schools, where it causes debate — students alternately empathise with the politician who has a job to do, the bereaved sisters and the man who “is drawn to IS not necessarily because of religious ideology but anger, belonging, wanting to be a man, and being an idiot in many ways.”

Shamsie’s win was held up as a triumph for diversity, at a time when it’s a heated topic in publishing circles. She has no time for her fellow author Lionel Shriver’s lampooning of Penguin Random House. Shriver called them “drunk on virtue” for focusing on getting authors from more of a mix of backgrounds and said it was at the expense of good storytelling.

“We are giving too much attention to Shriver’s comments,” says Shamsie. “To say that by focusing on writers that aren’t white means you are suspending all literary merit doesn’t make any sense. It’s a way of acknowledging that we have a blind spot — whatever industry you are in it’s easier to get noticed if you’re from a certain kind of background so to have a corrective to that seems fine. Class is the biggest issue and the less spoken-about one.”

Still, Shamsie thinks the decision to ban Shriver from a judging panel because of her comments is unnecessary. “She’s said similar things for a long time — they should’ve known that when they asked her to be a judge.”

“You could say that I wrote a book which deliberately chimed into discussions about IS recruitment. Why not say, ‘here is a writer who feels an urgency about what’s going on and wants to write about it?’ There may be agents who manipulate stories but that’s bad advice. I feel less angsty about it because I think false writing comes across.”

The idea for Home Fire came from Jatinder Verma, who runs the Tara Arts Theatre in south London. He asked her to write a play back in September 2014. “I don’t know how to write a play so he suggested adapting Antigone or the Orestea in a contemporary British Asian context. As soon as I started reading Antigone the contemporary echoes were clear. At the time Theresa May as Home Secretary was saying she was going to be tough on Brits joining IS.” With apologies to Verma, telling him she owed him a play, she had to turn it into a novel.

The play starts with two sisters whose brother has been a traitor and died, as the state wonders how to respond..

“We sometimes think we are in this moment that is like nothing else and can get terrified by that,” says Shamsie. “But Antigone’s problems were contemporary. And then IS was so medieval and barbaric, yet employing the most contemporary technology.”

A Muslim Home Secretary character felt far fetched at first. “I wanted an intimate, familial element in this large political story but I thought that I couldn’t have a Home Secretary from the same community as the person who had gone off to fight jihad. They would have to be fairly Right-wing in their politics because in the play they have a Tough on Terror line. I thought Tory, Muslim, migrant son, Home Secretary — surely not. This was before Sadiq Khan had said he was going to run for Mayor but we did have him, Sajid Javid and Sayeeda Warsi fairly prominent.”

Deliberately, she avoided finding out too much more about them, “because I wanted to to create my own guy. But the guy I created has all kinds of resonances with Sajid Javid. It’s weird.”

Nicola Sturgeon has tweeted about the novel but as far as Shamsie is aware no other politicians have read it. “I don’t want to say that I think politicians could learn from it,” she says modestly. “But it is interesting if you are only used to looking at from a policy angle to see a new side. Writing the novel I felt my sympathies and perspectives shifting. I like Isma, one of the sisters, but when I had to write from the Home Secretary’s view, who she hates, I found myself understanding him too.”

When she started the novel, Shamsie was “a newly minted British citizen”. “So the idea of stripping people of citizenship felt urgent. I was writing against the idea that you can’t be Muslim and British. The characters in the book are angry at certain government policies but I don’t know a Brit who isn’t.”

Being Muslim for her is “like being left-handed. I am and I always have been”. She grew up with dictatorships in Pakistan misusing religion to political ends, “and it gets my hackles up… but I also grew up with people who were simply practising Muslims in a way that gave them strength and made them kind, although you can do that without religion in your life too.”

The question “are you Muslim?”, is usually followed by “are you practising?” “My Jewish friends are never asked that. It comes out of a mistrust of Islam. You were born Muslim but to know you better we need to know what kind of a Muslim you are. One of the successes of al Qaeda and IS is that they’ve made their Islam the mainstream one.”

Writing the book made her feel more of a Londoner. “I wondered how I’d one day wake up and feel British, but writing this book I felt like British writer, not an outsider.” Her mother went to boarding school in Surrey and her family came on holiday to London when she was growing up (“we loved the rain”) — eventually she decided to stay.

Shamsie has never worn a headscarf but is supportive of women who do. “The Queen wears a headscarf, it’s not so ‘other’ but discussions about it have been linked to conversations about Muslims being weird and not like us. Malala Yousafzai wears a hijab and is the most independent-minded, strong woman, so if you’re trying to make it a sign of oppression that is not going to work. I don’t see why six-year-old girls are wearing them though — even in Islam it’s linked to puberty.”

“There are problems all over the place with it,” she adds. “When capitalism says ‘let’s take this over, there is the Muslim market, let’s have a modest collection’ — I object to it being called modest. Am I immodest by not wearing it? Am I a harlot? I do think the essence is a male/female issue about the gaze, though.”

The relationship at the centre of the novel is driven by desire but Shamsie was careful about sex scenes. “They can go badly wrong. You can’t be too anatomical — this body bit did that to this bit. You need to give a sense of what that meant.”

What’s next? “I want to know — do you have any ideas for me?” She laughs. “The terrible truth is I am bad at writing in London — I get distracted. This makes me sound like a ridiculous poncy writers but I started Home Fire in Brazil.”

She’s watching a lot of cricket at the moment, “because that’s what you do if you are from Pakistan”, and “being a bum,” she jokes. “But now I’m ready to write the next thing.” All eyes will be on what she predicts now.

@susannahbutter