Seeking refuge

Victoria Williamson was working as a primary school teacher in Glasgow when she saw two children arguing over a toy wizard’s cloak. "I overhead them yell at each other: ‘You can’t be Harry Potter, you’re a girl!’

‘Well you can’t be Harry Potter either, you’re black!’ The children were only six years old. Already, they had formed a firm idea of the roles they thought they could aspire to." Prompted to think about the "overwhelmingly middle-class, white, male" lead characters in the children’s books, films and TV shows around at the time, Williamson also interrogated her own writing, which she bashfully admits was no different. She says she had been "conditioned" by the books she read and the films she watched as a child to "see white British and American boys as the driving force behind plot development, the ones who got to go on exciting adventures".

The author adds: "It took two small children arguing over a wizard cloak to make me see that unless I challenged this stereotype in my own writing, children who didn’t fit the accepted ‘hero’ mould would never see themselves reflected in my novels".

Williamson’s bold middle-grade début The Fox Girl and the White Gazelle (Floris Books) centres on the tentative friendship between two troubled 11-year old girls. Caylin (who is struggling against her mother’s burgeoning alcoholism) and Reema (a Syrian Muslim refugee) are strangers living on the same Glasgow council estate when they discover an injured fox and her cubs living behind a shed in the estate’s communal garden. They join forces to care for the foxes, and subsequently uncover a shared passion for running.

Williamson created the character of Caylin with relative ease. "A lot of her happy memories of Glasgow came straight from my own childhood," she says. However, she soon realised that if she only wrote from Caylin’s point of view, then Reema would always be seen as a Syrian Muslim "other" through Caylin’s eyes: "Without a voice of her own, Reema would at best be a sidekick tagging along on Caylin’s journey of self-discovery."

To authentically tell Reema’s story in "her own words"—her heartache at the loss of her beloved big brother Jamal; her conflicting memories of Aleppo, recalling both the war-ravaged city she left and the colourful, lively souks of her early childhood—Williamson spent a lot of time researching the experiences of Syrian refugees, particularly those settled in Scotland. She came across the work of the Scottish Refugee Council (SRC) and, after meeting the fundraising team and speaking in person to young refugees settled in Aberdeen, she was "so impressed by [SRC’s] dedication and the wide range of services it offers" that she pledged to donate 20% of her royalties to the company.

Despite the weighty subject matter, The Fox Girl and the White Gazelle is not bleak; it’s a touching, thought-provoking adventure. The girls discover the "power of friendship and shared purpose to cross cultural and language barriers", helping one another redefine their ideas of "home" and what it means to belong.

According to Williamson, "every writer starts as an avid reader". She credits her parents for kindling her voracious appetite for reading from an early age. While she is quick to praise the "excellent" work of the Scottish Book Trust—"we’re lucky to have its support"—she does wonder what effect cuts to local libraries and schools could have in terms of encouraging future Scottish writers. Arguing that children who don’t have access to books at home, and who aren’t encouraged to read for pleasure, are unlikely to believe they can pursue writing as a hobby, far less a career, Williamson calls for "more direct funding that authors can access to enable them to spend more time visiting schools to encourage the next generation of young writers".

One thing is clear: writing is Williamson’s greatest passion. Her current projects include an adventure novel for teens, and a middle-grade novel exploring the issues faced by a boy with ADHD who is struggling to fit in with his new step-family.