Zainab Hameed is a 13-year-old who reads to understand the world, drawn to books about displacement and belonging like The Boy at the Back of the Class.
She writes with purpose, hoping her stories open eyes the way reading opened hers. That is an unusually clear sense of why she writes, and it gives her work a weight that is rare for any young author.
Her story appears in Whispers of Many Worlds. Zainab is a reminder that for some children, reading and writing are not hobbies. They are how they make sense of things.
