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Writing YA fiction first about Guantánamo, now Egypt, has taught me that the toughest material can actually make the most compelling stories My second novel for young adults, The Glass Collector, is set in Cairo around the time Obama visited the city in 2009 to make his first presidential speech in the Middle East . I had no idea when I wrote the novel quite how topical it would become. Great timing you might think. Sacred synchronicity, I prefer. My last novel, Guantánamo Boy , tells the story of 15-year-old Khaled, a British Muslim who is abducted while on holiday with his family in Pakistan and rendered to Guantánamo Bay. I chose to tackle these two difficult subjects because I believe that young people hunger and thirst for striking stories that allow them to make sense of the world they live in. Books that deal with controversial issues reflect the outside world but reveal truths that aren’t available in newsworthy statistics and facts. They put questions that are difficult to formulate, and provide answers that are often challenging and demanding but satisfying to consider. Modern children’s fiction is crammed with moral dilemmas and subjects as diverse as teenage pregnancy, drug use, domestic violence and war – so The Glass Collector , about a Zabbaleen teenager who’s a Coptic Christian living in the slums of Cairo under a regime that considers him dispensable and mostly invisible, fits right in. My motive, though, wasn’t to tell another controversial story, or to be topical, but to challenge the myth that people we don’t know, who have nothing, and live in countries we can barely locate, aren’t anything like us. There were other challenges too. My teenager, Aaron, spends his days collecting waste from the city and carting it home to a bullying step-family who separate the paper, metal, rags and glass before selling it to unscrupulous merchants. Decisions about voice, language, community, religious customs, food and education (or lack of), were pressing and ever present, but intense though they and the necessary inventions were, it soon became more important to highlight the conflict between the hero’s desires and his circumstances in order to create a vivid story. But the more challenging the idea, the more interesting and exciting a story is to write. It’s a profound and pleasurable experience to expand the imagination on every level. We live in war-torn, troubled times. No one can say what’s going to happen in Egypt in the wake of the revolution, but the Zabbaleen supported the protests in Cairo because they suffered under the Mubarak regime, which threatened their way of life and very existence. I chose difficult subjects because I believe old myths must be challenged before new myths can be written. New myths where everyone is valued and those who have the least are valued most of all. Children and teenagers Egypt guardian.co.uk