Jaigirdar’s latest novel, The Dos and Donuts of Love is inspired by the viral donut trend that gripped Dublin a few years ago. That’s always been very, very important for me. I’ve tried to tackle different aspects of queer identity, and how my characters are navigating that or how their family and friends are reacting to it. Her books are filled with richly nuanced queer Bangladeshi Muslim characters who intrinsically reflect her cultural values and reject the archetype of the typical oppressed queer Muslim. Jaigirdar says she writes the kind of books she wished she had while growing up and figuring out how she felt about her sexuality and culture. There are a lot of Bollywood movies that I loved but, again, the only LGBTQ+ representation we’ve seen has been very, very recent so even there, it was lacking…There’s also very little Muslim representation in Bollywood…-Adiba Jaigirdar The 29-year-old Bangladeshi-Irish writer was born in Dhaka before moving to Dublin at the age of 10, and these aspects of her identity form the heart of her work.Īs a gay South Asian Muslim woman, Jaigirdar says it was difficult to find any representation in the media that positively reflected her identity while she was growing up, even in the film empire Bollywood. But critical acclaim isn’t what motivates Jaigirdar to write – bringing LGBTQ+ representation to the publishing world is what drives her. After the book hit Time magazine’s 100 Best YA Books of All Time, she went on to land the YA Book Prize in 2022, for her follow-up novel, Hani and Ishu’s Guide To Fake Dating, and became a sensation on Tik Tok.
Not even Jaigirdar anticipated the splash her 2020 debut novel, The Henna Wars, would make in the literary world.
Award-winning Young Adult author Adiba Jaigirdar tells PinkNews about breaking boundaries in fiction, writing joyful queer stories and her latest novel, The Dos and Donuts of Love, out on June 8th.
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