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Interview

Ayad Akhtar answers questions about American Dervish and explains how growing up as a Muslim in America influenced his writing.

Why did you choose to set American Dervish in s Wisconsin?
Wallace Stevens writes beautifully of the process of creation as the fashioning of images with wood out of one's own forests, and stone out of one's own fields.

I grew up in Wisconsin and wanted very much to draw on the textures of my childhood. Though the story is fiction, I wanted to imbue it with a sense of lived reality, a register of authenticity I could achieve only by drawing on my own youth.

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Also, I wanted to depict a time before the world had politicized being Muslim. Setting the novel in the s allowed me to draw a picture of a community where much of the conflict engulfing the world today was already beginning to take shape.

How has your experience of growing up as Muslim-American affected your work?
Before writing A