Think Naguib Mahfouz or Taha Hussein — then lower your expectations.
Wassim has been writing stories since the fourth grade, when he plagiarized the opening crawl from Star Wars: A New Hope for a class assignment and hoped the teacher wouldn’t spot it. She did, and he had to make up a story in twenty minutes about a spaceman who disturbed a monster on the moon and ended up hiding in a crater for the rest of his life.
Wassim started taking the craft seriously after an author friend said, “Hey, you should really write a novel or something, mate,” and Wassim replied, “Yeah. Maybe I will.”
Wassim is a British-Syrian author. He lives in Reading, the Riviera of Berkshire, with his wife and their two children.
I have also been blogging and writing about the Middle East and Syria for almost twenty years under the name “Maysaloon”. During the revolution, I had over a dozen articles published in the Guardian, The Times (Thunderer Section), and al Jazeera under various pseudonyms. In 2011, the Guardian said that I was one of four bloggers to follow on Syria.