São Paulo – Brazil’s Zana Bonafe was selected to be part of the First Chapter – The ELF Seddiqi Writers’ Fellowship, a support and development program for emerging authors living in the United Arab Emirates and the surrounding region. Dubai-based, Bonafe was chosen together with nine other people and will participate in a year-long writing mentorship project that could lead to the publishing of a book. Pictured above, Bonafe during the announcement.
This is the first fellowship held by the world-renowned Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. Applicants had to submit an almost-completed manuscript to be developed and improved during the program. Renowned authors chose the applications and will give one-to-one mentorship sessions to the aspiring writers they selected.
Bonafe sent a project of the book What If (working title) that addresses international adoption of children. The work of fiction tells the story of a successful lawyer from New York that seeks to learn who saved him from a poor childhood in Brazil. This leads him to a nun and a series of intriguing discoveries on charity and international adoption.
The Brazilian writer was chosen by India’s author and journalist Shobhaa De, who published 20 books — including many bestsellers — and founded a publishing house in India. “She’s a very experienced person, and I’m extremely excited to get to learn from her,” Bonafe said.
Besides this one-to-one mentorship, writing fellows will be able to join a series of classes held by renowned writing institutions. They will also be taken on an international trip to a book festival to connect with publishing houses and agents, said Bonafe, who’s yet to learn more details on the program.
The ten selected authors for the First Chapter – The ELF Seddiqi Writers’ Fellowship include authors that write in Arabic and English. Selected Arabic writers include Huda Al Rawajfa, Mona Al Ali, and Sara Al Abdullah, while English writers include Zana Bonafe, Moxie Anderson, Sara Hamdan, Yi-Hwa Hanna, Mustafa Alrawi, Reem Hameed, and Kate Tindle.
Zana Bonafe
Brazil’s Zana Bonafe wrote the fiction book Maid in Dubai. The book, for which she did over 200 interviews, tells the story of a Philippine woman who cleans houses in the emirate. Published in English in 2018, he book is available in physical and eBook formats on Amazon for regions and countries like the United States, Europe and Brazil, and occasionally the UAE.
Holding a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of São Paulo (USP), an MBA in the United Kingdom and a specialization from Harvard, Bonafe worked for over ten years as Marketing & Strategy professor in Dubai. She has lived in eight countries, including the US, Germany, UK and Switzerland, and she has lived in the UAE for 14 years. “It’s home for me, now,” she says.
The author
Bonafe started writing professionally when she first arrived in the UAE. “I’ve changed my career some times in life, but I’ve always liked writing,” she says. She adds that reading had been encouraged by her parents, whose house featured a large library, and she used to write poetry in college. Bonafe participate in some Portuguese short story collections in Portugal, and she says she’s developing a similar project with UAE-based female writers.
“In general, my books deal with human relationships, personal transformations, connections between people,” Bonafe says. Her stories, she says, aim at making the reader think, reflect and feel. She lives with her husband, her daughter and her paintings in the UAE.
Translated by Guilherme Miranda
