A Mouth Full of Salt | The Reem Gaafar interview

In order to effectively manage time leading up to the publication of the book, questions were sent to Reem Gaafar in March 2025, and her responses were provided in writing.

Sarah Marie: Thank you so much for taking the time to answer these for me. When did you start working on A Mouth Full of Salt?

Reem Gaafar: I wrote the original short story during COVID and put it aside for several months, then kept coming back to it and adding bits here and there. When I decided that it was going to be a novel and that I wanted to submit it to The Island Prize, I sat down at the end of 2022 and early 2023 and wrote down the rest. I stopped counting draft versions after #19.

SM: What is it like working with Invisible Publishing?

RG: It’s been awesome so far! They’re incredibly thorough with their work, and are very responsive and accommodating. I’m very happy with my experience with them and highly recommend them for any authors planning on publishing in Canada.

SM: Can you talk a bit about your experience marketing the book so far?

RG: This has been the most difficult part so far. There have been a number of challenges related to location, since the book was published in the UK and US, and other countries, and with me being in Canada I was and continue to be unable to do any events in person which means I’ve had to rely on remote events. These have a limited audience and are not that many. For comparison, I had two very small events in Canada within our Sudanese community and sold more books in those events than had been sold anywhere else. This is also the same with the location of the publisher, with Saqi Books being UK based we had several promotional events there, but with the US there were zero. I had to rely on talking about my book on different social media platforms and recommending it to readers any chance I get. So I’m looking forward to the Canadian release and hopeful that I will be able to have more in-person events that would help with marketing.

Invisible has been doing great work so far and the book was listed in The Toronto Star, and is one of the upcoming books to read by CBC Books.

SM: Do you feel like there has been a lot of community engagement with the book? Any stand out reviews or feedback?

RM: I’m honestly surprised and quite impressed with the amount of engagement and positive feedback I’ve gotten from readers so far. I didn’t think people would be interested in reading about Sudan especially from a debut novelist, but the comments have been overwhelmingly positive. I really enjoy reading the reviews on Goodreads and other platforms and some of them make me want to go back and read the book all over again. One thing that stands out is that many readers say that this is the first time they read about Sudan, which is understandable because there aren’t many Sudanese writers who write in English.

SM: Are you reading any Canadian books now that you’d like to recommend?

RG: I recently finished A History of Burning by Janika Oza and highly recommend that.

SM: Do you get asked more questions about one specific character?

RG: More like one specific scene which is the childbirth scene. That has been the one thing that almost everyone who spoke to me about the book brought up.

SM: Did the story evolve as you were writing? Or, was this the story you wanted to tell from the start?

RG: The story changed dramatically and took me to places I didn’t want to go, but the core idea remained, which was a small boy dying while in the care of his grandmother. The first major change was when I had to remove a specific event because I was worried it would look like I had plagiarized another author’s work, and the story completely unraveled and had to be put back together again. I also expanded Nyamakeem’s story so that she moved from a mysterious secondary character to a main character and brought all the stray threads together in the end.

SM: Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions! I know you are very busy right now, so I really appreciate it. I hope I do get to chat with you about your book very soon.

Reem Gaafar is a writer, physician, and filmmaker. Her writing has appeared in African Arguments, African Feminism, Teakisi, Andariya and 500 Words Magazine, among other outlets. Her short story “Light of the Desert” was published in I Know Two Sudans. Her short story “Finding Descartes” was published in Relations: An Anthology of African and Diaspora Voices. A Mouth Full of Salt is her debut novel and Winner of the 2023 Island Prize. Gaafar lives in Canada with her husband and three sons.

Publisher: Invisible Books (April 1, 2025)
Paperback 8″ x 5″ | 256 pages
ISBN: 9781778430657

Sarah Marie

Sarah Marie is a perfectly unqualified, no-talent, lit/poetry enthusiast.A~literal nobody~ on social media, you may recognize her from commenting on your posts as if you sent them to her personally. She isvery impressedby your dedication to your work and to each other, and she believes in you.