My Writing Life: Sonia Faleiro
"Writing is not about talent. Writing is about hard work."
Sonia Faleiro is a journalist and non-fiction writer based in London. She’s an RLF Fellow and a 2023 Hawthornden Foundation Fellow. The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing was nominated for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the 2022 ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-fiction and the 2024 Premio Inge Feltrinelli Award. It was a New York Times Editor's Choice, a Sunday Times Book of the Year and a Human Rights Watch Book Club pick. It has been translated into French, Italian and Polish.
Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars was nominated for the Lettre Ulysses Award for the art of reportage and named a Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year 2011. It was also a Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times, Economist, NPR and Time Out Book of the Year. Beautiful Thing was translated into several languages including Hindi, Swedish, Dutch and French.
1. What book should every writer read?
I think every writer should read The Discovery of India by Jawaharlal Nehru, who was the first Prime Minister of India. It's a terrific book because, of course, it's beautifully written. It is immersive. But it is also a book about fighting imperialism, about fighting colonialism, about fighting racism, about building a country, about feeling pride. And I think it is a book about how to be free, which is something, now more than ever, that we need to appreciate and fight for.
2. What is the one thing you wish someone had told you before you started your writing career?
Writing is rewriting. And that writing is not about talent. Writing is about hard work. It's about resilience. It's about perseverance. It is about wanting to put down something really strong and powerful on the page, but being willing to rewrite that as many times as necessary in order to convey what you're trying to say.
3. What is the best advice you’ve ever received about your writing?
To be true to my values and true to what I want to say. In other words, to write what I love as opposed to writing for an audience or a publisher or for somebody out there.
4. What is the most underestimated challenge about being a professional writer?
Figuring out how to sustain yourself. Like any creative practice, writing is something that everybody appreciates, everybody loves, everybody knows they want it. Everybody wants to experience it, but not everybody wants to pay for it or truly understand what it takes for a writer to publish a book. And so trying to figure out how to be financially independent in order to continue to do what you love is one of the big challenges of being a writer today.
5. What was the proudest moment of your writing career?
That I continue to publish books and that I continue to be a journalist. I think that requires resilience and a sense of perseverance and integrity, which are qualities that I value.
6. What is your typical writing day like?
My typical writing day is really built around the other things that I absolutely have to do. I have a little girl that I need to take to school. I have a dog that needs to be walked in the park. So once I do those things, then I sit down to my writing.
I work with a timer so I don't exhaust myself. I try to get in four hours of really solid writing every single day. If I can do that, I feel like I’ve had a very good writing day. And once I've achieved that, then I can do all the other things that constitute my world and that I have to do in order to keep living.
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Brilliant thank you 🙏