When Soniah was fresh faced and thin she dabbled in a bit of modeling but decided that she liked spending all day in her pajamas reading and eating instead of concentrating on looking good. However after Soniah was forbidden from pursuing her first love of acting, and her second of dance choreographer she turned to her loyal and stalwart comrade: writing.

      Her mother wanted Soniah to be a journalist, but unable to maintain a poker face, Soniah veered towards fiction. Soniah had been writing, since age twelve, a bit of poetry here and a vignette there, but now began dabbling in short stories, and finally a novel.

      After many false starts (a few brave and eternally appreciated readers will emphasize on the ‘false’) Soniah decided that there was merit to replacing longhand with keyboard and voila, in a taptaptap emerged her voice. Her husband, Mansoor, would like to add that Soniah’s true voice found itself after marriage.

      Indeed it was after marriage that Soniah decided to write ‘seriously’ and make a career out of it. Soniah followed a self-directed course of writing (Must Read Writing Books), and though it was slow going, and at times frustrating, it’s always, always been a great joy to suddenly glean how to weave a theme without ever mentioning it, or play with structure, or taking the well rounded character- a learning curve of its own- from present to back story to future.  Soniah considers herself blessed to be able to create a universe within her head and then put it onto paper, as well as bizarre for liking it so!

      Soniah’s work explores the stranglehold of roots, the consequences of being uprooted, home and its place in today’s click of a mouse universe, and multicultural sexuality in a world where one half says virginity is crucial and the other half that it is not. Much of Soniah’s non-fiction addresses daring, displacement, death, and the nature of joy given the human need to please and be pleasing.

      For discourse and diatribe read Soniah’s newsletter Peeks ‘n’ Peeves