"I just had a lot of questions about the culture of noise we live in. And I was also a bit fed up with people just constantly having opinions which to me, that was the assumption, something jarring about the way people were jumping on or do jump on bandwagons and what you know and offer their opinion on absolutely everything and have a take and it's all black and white. And I just, I felt like all this noise is you can't you almost can't hear yourself think which is why the idea of silence came about."

Ayisha Malik is author of the Sofia Khan novels, This Green and Pleasant Land and The Movement. She was winner of the Diversity Book Awards 2020, and teaches creative writing for the academies, Faber and Curtis Brown. Ayisha lives in London.

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