Listen, Layla

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Summary

The hilarious follow-up title to You Must Be Layla by Yassmin Abdel-Magied.

I am Layla Kareem Abdel-Hafiz Hussein, the greatest Sudanese Australian inventor the world has ever seen. And if they don't know my name yet, they soon will. Inshallah!

School's out for the summer! And Layla's going to spend it getting her inventions ready for the grand design competition. But when her grandmother falls ill and her family must rush to Sudan to be with her, Layla feels like she's being pulled in many different directions.
Family, friends, home, inventions - there's a lot to navigate. With big protests looming in Sudan, could Layla save the day with her revolutionary ideas?

Exploring the diaspora experience, Listen, Layla is an own voices novel for young readers bursting with passion, humour and truth.

Praise for You Must Be Layla:
'A tonic, and a terrific debut . . . underneath its buoyant humour is a timely wisdom about finding friends in an alien culture' New Statesman
'This warm, humorous account of a larger-than-life Sudanese girl navigating a posh Australian school is an engaging read' Guardian
'Fresh funny and empowering' BookTrust
'A one-of-a-kind bundle of comedy and compassion' LoveReading

Reviews

Praise for You Must Be Layla: A laugh out loud story about making friends, carving your way in the world and having the confidence to do things your way. Layla is a fabulous, plucky protagonist, and her inventive attitude to surmounting hurdles is inspiring. The book is also an introduction to thinking about some of the barriers people of colour can face, illustrated by Layla's older brother Ozzie who has been applying for jobs and not even getting interviews. It offers an insight into normal Muslim family life...This story is fresh and funny and is an empowering read.
BookTrust

About the author

Yassmin Abdel-Magied

Yassmin Abdel-Magied is a Sudanese-born Australian writer, broadcaster and award-winning social advocate with a background in mechanical engineering.

Yassmin founded her first organization, Youth Without Borders, at the age of sixteen, published her debut memoir, Yassmin's Story, with Penguin Random House Australia at age twenty-four, and in 2019 followed up with her first fiction book for young readers, You Must Be Layla, which she is adapting for screen. She was also selected for the 2020 Soho Theatre Writers' Lab in London, as well as for the prestigious 2021 Australia Council Keesing Studio Writers Residency in Paris.

An advocate for the empowerment of women, youth and people of colour, Yassmin has been awarded numerous awards for her advocacy, including the 2018 Young Voltaire Award for Free Speech. Yassmin has travelled to over twenty countries speaking to governments, NGOs and multinational companies on a range of topics including unconscious bias, resilience and inclusive leadership. Her TED talk, 'What does my headscarf mean to you?', has been viewed over two million times and was chosen as one of TED's top ten ideas of 2015. Yassmin's critically acclaimed essays have been published in numerous anthologies, including the Griffith Review, the bestselling It's Not About the Burqa and New Daughters of Africa. Her words can also be found in publications like the Guardian, Teen Vogue, The New York Times, The Independent and Glamour.

Yassmin's broadcasting portfolio is diverse: she presented the national TV show Australia Wide, a podcast on becoming an F1 driver and created Hijabistas, a series looking at the modest fashion scene in Australia. Yassmin is a regular contributor to the BBC, Al Jazeera, TRT and Monocle 24, and has co-hosted The Guilty Feminist.

Outside advocacy, she worked as an engineer on oil and gas rigs for four years and is an internationally accredited F1 journalist.

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