‘It costs less than we think to stand up for truth’: author Yassmin Abdel-Magied on the power of ‘wilful women’

What happens when one person is brave enough to speak up against injustice and no one listens? It’s a question so many of us are facing – sensing that the need to fight back against a rising tide of far-right politics, racism, authoritarianism and technofacism is more pressing than ever. 

Enter Yassmin Abdel-Magied, whose debut novel At Sea – written under the name Y M Abdel-Magied – exquisitely captures this phenomenon while also managing to be an expertly crafted work of literary art. 

Born in Khartoum, Sudan and raised in Australia, Yasmin’s dogged social and political activism began early. While still in high school in Brisbane, she founded Youth Without Borders, an organisation focused on youth-led social justice initiatives, and consequently won Young Queenslander of the Year in 2010 and Queensland Young Australian of the Year in 2015. 

She began her professional life as a mechanical engineer and spent four years as one of very few women on various oil drilling projects around Australia. While working on the rigs, she started writing blogs – the first step in what would turn out to be an extraordinary journey as a writer. She’s written young adult novels, beginning with You Must Be Layla, a novel about a Sudanese Australian girl navigating teenage life among an upper-class crowd. She’s also written non-fiction, including Stand Up and Speak Out Against Racism – a guide to speaking to children about prejudice and racist oppression – in 2023.

Yassmin is also a successful screenwriter – you may have seen her credits on Emmerdale, whose writing room she joined after being selected for the prestigious ITV Original Voices scheme. And her Ted Talk – which I remember watching back in 2014, years before I knew her – has almost 3 million views and has been named among Ted’s Top 10 Ideas.

Now, just a few months after launching her latest YA novel, Silverbrook: Yumna and the Golden Horse – and months after running Creatives4Sudan, an auction to raise funds for people escaping genocide in El Fasher, as well as hosting a fundraising screening of the film Sudan, Remember Us, with further plans for screenings of upcoming film Khartoum in June – she is making her debut as an adult literary novelist.

I have a former life as an engineer and now an author, screenwriter, and social advocate. I've had a lot of topics close to my heart over the years. Sudan is currently the closest, but I also love writing. I tend to love writing wilful women; women who are trying to bend the world to their will, despite or in spite of all that the world throws at them.

At Sea follows Zainab, who's a Sudanese woman and a driller on offshore oil rigs. She's worked her way up the ranks. And she's at home with her pregnant sister one day when her boss comes by and says, “I've got that promotion you've always wanted to run the rig.” But there's a catch: on the rig that he's sending her to, something bad is going down and she needs to figure it out. We follow her over the course of three days as she tries to figure out what's going wrong and as she tries to speak up.

She tries to convince everyone to listen to her. On one hand, it's about being an outsider in this closed-off world, a woman in a male-dominated industry, but also, at the heart, it's: how do you hold on to truth when nobody around you believes you?

All the technical things that happen in the book actually happened in that case. I studied it really closely. I went back to all the technical reports from the actual explosion and made sure that even the mechanism of how things were going wrong were reflected in the novel. I've always been obsessed with how something that we think is an engineering failure is almost always a human failure, a failure of people to listen to each other.

I wanted to take people into that sensation, into that frustration and that feeling of: why isn't anyone listening? I didn’t want this to be a polemic. I love writing essays and polemics, but in this case I really wanted to take it to the emotional, human level. I wanted to remind us that these things happen because people make choices.

Interestingly, one of the things that people are saying is that the end comes really rapidly. But that was actually quite a deliberate choice because I think that is how these things happen. Nothing happens, nothing happens, nothing happens – and then shit hits the fan. And people say: “Whoa, where did that come from?” But in fact, if you've been paying attention, you would have seen it building. And it's, again, easy in hindsight for me to say, if I was on that rig, I probably would have paid attention. I hope I would’ve, but truthfully I don’t know, and that's the question I asked myself. That's the question I ask the readers.

For Muslims, the thing that we all hope to do, the last words that we hope to speak, is called the Shahada, it's the proclamation of faith: “Ash-hadu an la ilaha illa-llah, wa ash-hadu anna Muhammadan rasul ullah.” It means: “I bear witness that there is no God but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God.” The last line of the book is the beginning of the Shahada, which is: “I bear witness.” 

And there are lots of different ways for that to be interpreted: there's obviously the fact that it is the beginning of the Shahada, but there is also a larger point about the importance of bearing witness. I chose to write it in capitals. It's an exclamation. It's a proclamation. It's a statement of being.

I've done a lot of thinking about the dynamics on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. For example, people hear “diversity and inclusion” and they think it's just about hiring people who are different to you. But it’s also about interrogating the patterns that you've been socialised into reinforcing and repeating: it’s about the cognitive errors, actually, that you are conditioned to make.

There were moments on Deepwater Horizon where different decisions could have been made. But then these particular dynamics came into play. You had confirmation bias, for example. You had people look at information in front of them, new information, but because they didn't want to change their mind, because they already believed something, they couldn't accept this new information. They literally made up concepts so that they wouldn't have to change their minds. 

To be the lone voice to put our hands up and say, “hey, I feel like maybe something might be wrong here. I feel like maybe we should make a different decision” is incredibly difficult. And the reality is that, usually, the person who's putting their head above the parapet to begin with is the person who has the most to lose. 

It actually costs us less than we think to stand up for truth. People can really convince themselves it will cost them too much to speak up. But that is what authoritarians depend on. That is how you keep people in line. But actually, if there's a group working together, suddenly the cost is split amongst you and it's a lot easier to bear.

Yes, and I think about this often: if you're on minimum wage and you have to give £10 versus if you're a billionaire and you have to give £10 – the literal cost is the same, but the relative cost is worlds apart. And yet the people that are so often putting their lives on the line are the ones on minimum wage and the ones who are the billionaires are like: “I can't part with the £10.”

What does that say about us? That people have all this capital and they're choosing not to use it.

Writing a continuing drama is one of the most fun and challenging experiences for a screenwriter because of the pace of the story development and because of the fact that you’re coming into a show that has such a long, storied history. I genuinely feel like it’s an honour to work on a show that millions of people watch every single day. The impact that this kind of cultural creation has is far more significant than we often give it credit for. My next episode comes out on 2 June, so keep your eyes peeled!

At Sea by Y M Abdel-Magied is published by Canongate (£16.99)