There is a particular grief in knowing a history exists, that people lived it, carried it, passed it down in family stories and silences, and then watching it disappear from the written record.

Not because it wasn’t significant. Because no one with a pen decided it was worth telling. Or because those telling our stories, aren’t from our communities.

Mona Zac has decided. She is making the leap into historical fiction. Her first novel centres around Muslims in Sri Lanka, a history which most readers have never encountered in fiction. She is also writing from her Mauritian heritage. Communities at the margins of their own national stories, whose histories risk becoming invisible to the generation that comes next.

One line from her application stayed with me.

“If I didn’t play a part in bringing these histories to light, my children, and those like them, would inherit a past that was only partially visible.”

That is not just a reason to write. That is a reason to act.

She also wrote that she wants to tell these stories without feeling pressured to make them more palatable to a Western audience. I recognised something in that sentence, the specific weight of that pressure. The way it asks you to soften, to explain things that shouldn’t require explanation, to translate not just language but identity itself. Something I have had to balance throughout my entire career.

I built The Noble Narrative so writers would not have to make that trade.

We’ve awarded Mona a full al-hakawati scholarship. She begins her journey into long-form historical fiction with her values intact, her communities represented, and a programme that will hold her to both.

In her own words: “Remembrance is a form of resistance.”

Welcome, Mona. The stories you’ll tell, and the ones you’ll preserve, matter more than you know.