Episode Summary

What happens to a love story that has nowhere to go? And who has the right to tell it?

In this episode of How You Find Your Voice, host Jessie Huth speaks with novelist Sarvat Hasin about her novel Strange Girls, a story about female friendship, creative ambition and the complicated emotions that can exist between admiration and rivalry.

The book follows two young women who meet at university and become deeply entwined in one another’s lives. Their friendship is creative, admiring and competitive all at once. It is the kind of relationship that can leave a permanent imprint.

Jessie and Sarvat talk about the emotional complexity of intense friendships, the strange grief of friendship breakups and the ways our lives gradually move in different directions as we grow older.

They also discuss creative ambition, the realities of becoming a writer and the ethical questions that arise when fiction draws on shared experiences. Who owns a story when two people have lived it together?

This is a conversation about creativity, longing, rivalry and the things that are often left unsaid between friends.

Topics Covered

• Intense female friendships and formative relationships
• The emotional complexity of friendships formed in youth
• Creative admiration and rivalry between friends
• The strange grief of friendship breakups
• The ethics of fictionalising shared experiences
• Who owns a story when two people have lived it together
• Creative ambition and the realities of becoming a writer
• The role of circumstance, time and opportunity in creative life
• Writing towards questions you do not yet know the answer to
• Sarvat’s approach to writing by “chasing the feeling” of a moment

About Sarvat Hasin

Sarvat Hasin is a novelist and dramaturg from Pakistan. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford. Her first novel, This Wide Night, was published by Penguin India and longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Her second book You Can't Go Home Again was published in 2018 and featured in Vogue India's and The Hindu's best of the year lists. Her third novel, The Giant Dark (Dialogue Books, Hachette UK) won the Mo Siewcharran Prize was shortlisted for the RSL Encore Award. She lives in London. You can read more about Sarvat Hasin and Strange Girls here.

About the Podcast

How You Find Your Voice is the podcast that asks brilliant guests, mostly women, how they found or reclaimed their voices.

Through conversations with writers, activists, artists, thinkers and entrepreneurs, we explore the work they have made, the lives they have lived and the inner transformations that made it possible.

We talk about turning points and resistance, doubt and silence, creative risk and process, as well as the messy business of becoming.

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Key Words

Sarvat Hasin, Strange Girls novel, female friendship in literature, creative rivalry between friends, women writers podcast, writing fiction process, ethics of storytelling, creative ambition, literary podcast, finding your voice podcast