Meet Our New Intern: Tassneem Abdulwahab

The urge to write was not an ever-present companion in the early years of my life. It was more like a slow-rolling epiphany, sweeter, more instinctive, like a hard-earned deduction I had arrived at through a series of infallible coincidences and a steady love I hadn’t named.

Growing up in early 2000s coastal Jeddah, I—like most kids of immigrant parents—lived in a weirdly curated world, wide open yet incredibly particular. In part, I attribute this paradox to the culture that I began to recognize at the edges of my earliest memories—one that wasn’t my parents’ or Jeddah’s, but a third, strangely unified mishmash of people. Attending an international school does that.

We all spoke English and Arabic, but mostly English, and when we spoke Arabic, we borrowed phrases from each other’s dialects until you couldn’t entirely tell where anyone of us was from. That was one of the irrefutable rules of the school: it didn’t matter where you came from. Other unspoken expectations included a future STEM career, which is why, obsessed with science as I was (read: watching hours of rare disease documentaries), I wanted to become a scientist, maybe work in a lab.

I was so sure of my love for science and the predetermined path that I never gave much thought to the other hours I spent in a state of pure flow: drawing, reading, writing poetry with my childhood best friend.

It was with figuring out that I didn’t want a STEM degree that I recognized I was just as obsessed with the arts, in the way kids are: intrinsically, joyfully, like something in the human soul aches for creativity. I loved science in the way I loved puzzles, something to figure out, to learn, but I loved storytelling in a way I felt in my soul.

I hadn’t yet figured out I loved writing at eight or nine, but I loved story. I watched Mulan every day for a year and pretended I was her with a disassembled hula hoop part as my bamboo stick. Then came Tangled, Brave, and plenty of other movies in glossy DVD cases I’d pick out with my mom. Elementary school visits introduced me to The Magic Tree House; I discovered old copies of A Series of Unfortunate Events on my brother’s shelves; I read Matilda in two days. And throughout it all, I was diving into these stories, their characters, their journeys.

I wrote as a hobby, hoping to replicate the feeling of reading and watching good stories. I was good at grammar, writing with a technicality that suited 10^th grade in 8^th grade (and got my essay rejected for it), but it wasn’t until my junior year of high school that I realized I wanted to write, preferably forever.

And that was it. Even when everyone questioned my decision to pursue a writing degree, I knew it was what I wanted. My time at university and my lecturers shaped my writing and myself in ways I couldn’t have imagined. It was during my final year that publishing—a once mysterious entity hovering somewhere far above me and my writing—sparked my interest for the first time.

Case studies and a newfound appreciation for the teams involved in making a book made me want to play a part in the publishing process, to champion global voices in a way that made sense to child me who thought the diversity inside her school bubble was the norm everywhere. I’m incredibly excited to see what the next six months with Sundress will bring, and I can’t wait to be part of making literary things happen!

Tassneem Abdulwahab (she/her) is an aspiring writer and editor with a BA (Hons) Creative and Professional Writing from UWE Bristol. With a strong interest in culture, history, and psychology and a love for fiction, her writing often draws on one or more of these threads to tell character-centric stories. Trained in oil painting, she recently exhibited and sold two portrait paintings in February 2025. In her free time, you can find her buying more books (no, seriously—she owns three editions of Little Women), snapping pictures of the little details, or sitting at her easel!