The Coin Author Yasmin Zaher: ‘Reading is liberatory; it can transform you’

Dylan Thomas prize-winning writer Yasmin Zaher is quickly making a name for herself in the literary world. And with her upcoming event at the Chelsea Arts Festival this September – where she will be in conversation with the internet’s resident librarian Jack Edwards – we can’t wait to see what she will do next. Following the success of her debut novel The Coin, Belinda Bamber chats to the Palestinian writer about literary, political and sexual freedoms.

C&TH Book Club: The Coin By Yasmin Zaher

What is ‘The Coin’ of the title?

The narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman who moves to NYC in search of reinvention and the American dream. On arrival, she remembers swallowing a coin as a child, and becomes convinced it is still stuck in her body, driving her strange, compulsive behaviour. Gradually, it becomes a symbol of her childhood and trauma, infiltrating all aspects of her new life: love, sex, money, debt and her work as a teacher. As I was writing, The Coin alchemised into a mystical novel, and I still find all kinds of riddles and surprises in it.

Why is the narrator obsessed with cleansing rituals that never quite purify the ‘rot’ of her body beneath her McQueen dress?

She goes through an existential transformation, from a put-together, purified, aesthetic persona to a human being moved by her animal nature. At the end she’s mad, uncivilised and unkempt, but free of beauty and class.

Did you enjoy creating this sweet-natured teacher with underlying American Psycho traits?

It’s a pleasure to write an unexpected, somewhat unhinged character, enacting some of our deepest, most repressed fantasies. The devotion of her lover, Sasha, doesn’t satisfy her. What does she need to feel fulfilled? Self-acceptance, I think. Her cleaning, grooming and dressing is a form of self-loathing.

How much of The Coin is based on your own life, given your childhood in Palestine?

It came from deep places in my mind and soul, and in that respect it’s very personal. But it’s not biographical. It’s as if my life was the paint and I painted a picture of another life with it.

There are some hilariously sardonic lines. Would you describe yourself as a satirist?

I don’t know how I managed to write these funny lines. I’m trying to do it again in my second novel and it’s a total failure. There’s a kind of private freedom in writing your first novel that allowed me to take risks and write outrageous politically incorrect things.

Is humour a defence against expectations of you as a ‘Palestinian writer’?

There are a lot of expectations on ‘identity’ writers. I didn’t do it consciously, but looking back I was probably trying to fight my way out of the boxes. The Palestinian narrator of this novel is free, rich, sexually liberated, and above all, not a victim – she’s even somewhat of a perpetrator. She’s not that good or moral. There is something humanising about not being perfect.

Your influences include Vonnegut, Houellebecq and Millet. What links them?

They’re all free. Reading is liberatory; it can transform you. I wasn’t the same person after reading Kurt Vonnegut aged 15, or Catherine Millet’s The Sexual Life of Catherine M., where she describes having group sex in the back of a truck. In my 20s I related deeply to Houellebecq characters who had awful thoughts about Arabs like me. It made me more open-minded.

Congrats on winning the 2025 Dylan Thomas prize. Did you celebrate at McQueen?

Interestingly, I lost all my desire for luxury and fashion in the process of writing this book, as if I’d purged it. It downgraded my personal style!

Favourite London haunts?

A second-hand bookshop called Skoob, in Bloomsbury. London is also the best city in the west for Arab food.

Discover Yasmin Zaher At The Chelsea Arts Festival

Yasmin Zaher is at Chelsea Arts Festival on 20 September in conversation with internet star Jack Edwards (chelseaartsfestival.com).

The Coin by Yasmin Zaher (£14.99, Footnote Press)