Bobuq Sayed: Pour Everything Into Your Book
In this interview, author Bobuq Sayed discusses the challenge of balancing truth with fiction in their new novel, No God but Us.
Bobuq Sayed is a 2022–23 Steinbeck fellow at San José State University, a Lambda Literary scholar, and an award-winning James A. Michener fellow in the University of Miami's MFA program. Sayed now lives in New York. For more on Bobuq Sayed and their work, visit BobuqSayed.com, and follow them on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
In this interview, Bobuq discusses the challenge of balancing truth with fiction in their new novel, No God but Us, their advice for other writers, and more.
Name: Bobuq Sayed
Literary agent: Maria Cardona at Aevitas Creative Management
Book title: No God but Us
Publisher: Harper Books
Release date: May 26, 2026
Genre/category: Literary Fiction
Previous titles: A Brief History of Australian Terror (chapbook by Common Rooms) – Australia specific; Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia (co-editor) - Allen & Unwin – Australia specific
Elevator pitch: Two queer Afghan men from wildly different walks of life collide in Istanbul in the peak of 2015’s so-called European Migrant Crisis, showcasing the devastating consequences of love and security.
What prompted you to write this book?
I was living in Istanbul in 2015 and working with recently arrived queer and trans refugees. The book was written to draw attention to the complicated and often invisible power indexes that migration elicits among gender and sexual minorities, and how the sometimes-abstracted conversations around border policy impact real people and their relationships.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
I started writing the book from the perspective of an Afghan-American character encountering a community of newly arrived queer and trans refugees in Istanbul. However, it soon became clear to me that this lens invariably reproduced a solipsistic voyeurism that often pervades travel writing. I decided to combat this by alternating this point of view with the perspective of a queer Afghan refugee who acts, in a way, as a foil, constantly undermining the authoritativeness of the Afghan-American and highlighting the faultlines of privilege and power at play.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
There was a pressure for me to provide a cleaner sense of resolution for my characters, which I resisted at every turn. The unfortunate truth is that the scars of migration and border violence often leave an indelible mark on queer and trans refugees. Getting pushed to the margins of society—and facing detention, sexual violence, and alienation—grinds people down. With the book, I wanted to consider the ways I could show the profound flaws of the legal above-ground migration system, and how its imperfections force people to seek other routes.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
When you’re writing a book based on a very real and not-too-distant historical context, I learned the unique challenges of juggling the demands of fiction and dramatic action with the true dates and conditions as they actually took place. 2015 wasn’t that long ago so it was beholden on me to render the particular political context with care and veracity, given the need for the portrayal to have some familiarity for the reader.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I want my readers to feel a sense of kindship and sympathy with queer and trans people who flee their homes in pursuit of a better life. These are, after all, narratives that undergird so much of American history from the Great Migration to the long tradition of gender-questioning kids from the suburbs leaving their homes and heading for the city. As though the difficulties of any relocation aren’t difficult enough, international migration presents its own unique forms of hardship, including the struggles of smuggling, documentation retrieval, the disclosure of trauma, and immersion in new languages and culture. Ultimately, this is not a scholarly or informational text. The novel is a story of the relationships and communities beneath the headlines.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Pour everything into your book. Every conversation you’ve ever had, person you’ve ever met, text you’ve ever read, memory you’ve ever made. Let all of it in. There is no second debut. No publishing experience can ever be taken for granted. This is your chance, your one wild and precious life. The time for restraint and political cowardice is never. Nothing worth winning is won without an element of risk. Worrying about the market, or what a naysayer might think, forfeits the artfulness of the project and yields influence to economic forces outside your control. Honor the integrity of the ugliness. Let there be no heroes or good deed left unpunished.
