Pulsating Between the Micro and the Macro: A Conversation with Writer and Critic Arifa Akbar

As The Guardian’s chief theatre critic, it is perhaps inevitable that Arifa Akbar’s works of narrative nonfiction are unbuttoned from the constrictions of a single genre or perspective. Her second book Wolf Moon: A Woman’s Journey into the Night follows in the footsteps of her acclaimed memoir Consumed: A Sister’s Story by establishing a form that takes memoir as a starting point but expands into a larger canvas alive with references to literature, folklore, psychology, theatre, cinema and social and political histories. Wolf Moon explores the night in all its dimensions: the dangers and fears it evokes, the thrills of hedonism in the dark, and the precarious lives of the labour force that toils when others are asleep. To read Akbar is to witness a roving mind in the active process of meaning-making on the page. 

Two contrasting expeditions bookend Wolf Moon. In the prologue Akbar arrives in Sark, a dark sky island in the English Channel, in the dead of winter where owing to the lack of light pollution she is enveloped by pitch blackness at night. The concluding chapter situates the reader in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago, where the sun never sets in the summer. The rest of the narrative is interleaved with an odyssey through a series of nocturnal experiences including a 24-hour play in the West End, a night shift in a nursing home in North London, and revelling at a late-night Punjabi comedy show in Lahore. Akbar’s writing has an oneiric quality that translates interiority into language — she writes about insomnia, night terrors, of strange female figures glimpsed on Waterloo Bridge, of the joyful abandon of dancing all night in a techno club in Berlin, all in crystalline prose.

I read Wolf Moon while travelling on my own in a city in Spain, often walking through unfamiliar streets late at night thinking about how Akbar reminded me that the night outside can still be a furtive space for women. But the book also gave me an expansive view of the night and its darkness, its exhilarating possibilities, and “how we need the darkness as a border, to feel the day beginning again.” Despite its attentiveness towards analysis and cultural criticism, Wolf Moon also has an emotional undercurrent of vulnerability and self-reckoning that makes it deeply touching and irrevocably humanistic. 

My conversation with Arifa Akbar about the book’s psychic and intellectual explorations and her relationship with fear, darkness and cities, follows. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Rida Bilgrami: I am going to borrow from Deborah Levy who once remarked that writing is simply asking yourself interesting questions and then striving to answer them. What questions led you towards writing Wolf Moon?

Arifa Akbar: It began as a singular question: Why am I afraid of darkness? Fear is not something I identify with much in other facets of my life. I’m a woman living on her own in London, a large city with many dangerous facets. I’ve always enjoyed a challenge and a risk. I’m not scared of the night, per se, but I have a childlike visceral reaction to darkness. Paradoxically, in some ways, I also love the night. I live between night and day in my job as well. I’m an insomniac, partly through choice, because I like the concentration and focus of the night.

Deborah Levy is absolutely right in that writing is a series of questions you are trying to answer but what I found with my last book Consumed as well as this one is that you could spend years asking interesting questions and trying to arrive at an answer through writing about them but there is no one definitive answer. There is only making peace with the unknowability of the answer. I had some breakthroughs and discoveries around my fear of the dark but the notion that answering the question could render me less afraid or help me conquer the fear is not necessarily true.

RB: What were some of those discoveries and breakthroughs?

AA: The discoveries were at two levels – the psychic and the intellectual. The intellectual discoveries happened through some of my travels such as my time in Svalbard, the northernmost point of the earth; the disorientating experience of what it feels like to be in the midnight sun.

The emotional and psychic discoveries were more significant. My breakthroughs relate to my relationship with my father, his gradual surrender to dementia, but importantly, his storytelling, some of which he inherited from his sisters growing up in pre-partition India. Through writing the book I began to link my fear with the stories I heard from him growing up – a blend of gothic South Asian folklore and Islamic supernatural beliefs about djinns and daayans that shaped the fear of darkness for me. I didn’t know this at the outset of the writing process, but I concluded that my fear was related to my father both as a celebration of him and an act of imagination. Darkness is a blank canvas for the imagination – you can leave it empty or fill it up and my father filled it up. Perhaps now I’m telling my own scary stories when I’m looking into the darkness and being afraid of it. I also carry sadness about my parent’s ageing. Behind the stories of darkness are one’s own inner darkness. 

In the book I talk about living as a lodger in the north-east of England in the late 90s where I developed sleep paralysis as a result of sensing the presence of spirits in my bedroom. Revisiting that experience two decades later made me realise that the energy we feel around us is in fact a reflection of what we feel within. The charge I felt in the room may have been the weight of my fears that had accumulated night after night in an unfamiliar place. My ambiguous relationship with the unseen – ghosts and spirits – is really about what I fear within, those unresolved, scared parts of myself.

RB: As I read Wolf Moon I was admiring the vastness of your field of inquiry. You effectively braid childhood memories, oral storytelling traditions with societal issues such as homelessness and the night labour economy as well the spiritual aspects of sacred darkness. How did you decide on the scope of the emotional and intellectual terrain of the book?

AA: The starting point was the inheritance of storytelling and imagination from my father and fear of the dark but at some point, in the structuring and composition of the book I realised I had bitten off more than I could chew. As you note, this subject is so vast, it covers a lot of ground, from sex work, and the night economy to the sacred djinns, and transgression at night. For about a year I didn’t write anything, and I pretended to my editors and my agent that I was writing. Instead, I was trying to frame the book and cut a shape through it. It became clearer to me that I am touching upon seven different areas, and I tried to find a journey through them. I chose to begin with my weekend in Sark, where I was peering into the cat’s cradle of black in the dead of night, and going deeper into that tunnel of darkness to see what’s there hidden from ordinary view such as the lives of people that work at night while we sleep, the homeless women that roam on the streets at night. The narrative then moves on to reclaiming darkness and journeying through its liberating aspects such as dance culture. One of the later chapters on Dark Edens is about my discovery of the multitude of night ecosystems such as the New Spitalfields whole produce market in London. In a sense I wanted to take the reader on a 12-hour journey from the dark to the light and also see the light within the night.

RB: Wolf Moon is also a travelogue. You take us to several cities – Berlin, Amsterdam, Lahore – but it is London that has a looming presence in the book. You excavate stories of the city’s inhabitants that are cloaked in invisibility including those who are part of the gig economy, night workers in arts and entertainment venues and junior NHS doctors working night shifts. What did you learn about the city and its inhabitants in the process of researching and writing the book that surprised you?

AA: London has a different personality at night; it becomes a different world. Charles Dickens discovered that world. He was an insomniac nightwalker and when I started revisiting his essays about his nocturnal ramblings, I grew curious to explore what Dickens’ nights would look like in the present and you see those portraits of the many people I met in the nighttime sketched out in the book. The night is inhabited by people that are there in the day, but we choose not to see them, or we don’t see them as clearly. The night hours reveal another side, quite a hard side, but a beautiful literary side as well. 

More importantly, my sense of belonging in London deepened. Perhaps this seems like a matter of fact but not to me. As an immigrant, as someone who has had a difficult and equivocal relationship with Britishness, with what home is to me, where home is to me, that felt very significant. The city at its most dark, at its most potentially dangerous, felt like mine. Cycling around London and seeing its many different facets made me realise I’m completely at home here. I’ll live and die here. 

RB: You mention cycling a few times in the book as your preferred mode of moving through the city. Does cycling open up a new way of noticing and observing the city?

AA: Absolutely. There is freedom and protection in cycling especially for women. You are on wheels and less prone to attack. You have this breezy relationship with people who are also passing by. You can eavesdrop on conversations. There’s something quite exhilarating about observing the city while you’re whizzing around on a bike. When I am traversing the city, I also notice that I am sharing bike lanes or the road with many who are part of the zero hours economy that is also on two wheels. I don’t want to conflate the work they are doing with what I am doing. As a theatre critic, I cannot count myself among them. In many ways we are on opposite ends of the night economy. They are engaged in tough physical labour and I’m cycling home, having seen a West End play, which is an elite pursuit. I’m on the fringes of the night economy as I’m not forced to be working through the night. However, my father also worked a night job as a British rail guard and then after retirement he worked some night shifts at the Courtauld Gallery in Somerset House. I have questioned if my father’s night shifts hastened the onset of dementia given that disrupted sleep is linked to the illness. So, I was curious as to how night work affects the psyche of those whose lives intersected with mine while cycling around the city.

RB: My favourite part of the book is the chapter where you recount an evening spent at Al Falah Theatre in Lahore being a spectator at a late-night Punjabi comedy show. I not only enjoyed your description of the acts but also how you probe both your own perceptions and the biases of those around you. Tell me more how you approached writing that chapter.

AA: That was a hard chapter to write and I wrestled with how to approach what I wanted to say. To start off this I took a journalistic approach documenting details about the show I was seeing, the people who were guiding me in and that was going to be the material for the chapter. The comedy act was interspersed with song and dance numbers performed by women who shimmied onto the stage with a hint of sexual frankness to the routine. Although I had lived in Lahore in my early childhood, I’d never seen this kind of revelry in a public space before. There was no coyness or shame in that performance. I was suddenly at the edge of my seat bedazzled. As I was watching the performance I was logging the feelings that were coming up for me towards these women performing on stage. I just remember noting that I absolutely loved the confidence of these women and it felt very unorthodox in Lahore.

In the chapter I write about a Dutch woman who was sitting next to me who found the acts to be distasteful and left the auditorium. In my view she was applying the lens of white feminism to a sub-culture and theatrical tradition, which has its own values, its own definitions of what empowerment means. Her brand of feminism views these women as victims but I questioned that universalisation. I felt a bit ashamed of my positive response in relation to her negative response. I felt a deep sense of discomfort, which I couldn’t fully articulate at the moment and my way through that discomfort was to speak to friends in Pakistan to understand more about these performers and the cultural context they were operating within. When I went backstage and talked to the women dancers, there was no hint of victimhood. They were looking me in the eye, laughing at me and my naïve questions. After returning from Pakistan when I started laying it out on the page I was able to work through my reaction vis a vis the woman who storms out. I knew that I resented her sense of entitlement to judge something she knows little about. I wanted to unpick that while also questioning if the female performers were neither in a binary of exploited victims nor morally corrupt actors. I was interested in exploring if this night work in a conservative society like Pakistan facilitates a kind of freedom and flouting of its religious morality code. 

RB: In the chapters where you describe your time spending an entire night at the cinema watching David Lynch films and your time at the club Berghain in Berlin there is a sense that you are documenting what is unfolding in these spaces, but also a vivid sense of your own embodied and, in some cases, transcendent experiences. What is your research process, do you take notes while you are in these spaces or is the page where you process these experiences?

AA: I’m led by the experience of a place and the research comes afterwards. I try not to read about the place before I go, because I think there’s a real primacy towards having an embodied experience. This is a book about a woman’s journey into the night and specifically me as a woman in the night. I wanted it to be first and foremost about the body, about sensations and how they interact with a sense of place. Then I add layers to that experience by carrying out research on places and histories to sense-make but also situate my experience within a broader context. I am also conscious of not only being led by memory because I tend to think that has the potential for navel gazing and being self-indulgent. I know other people do a brilliant job of it, but to me it would be a bit too narrow so I want to look out to art and science and history and to the world at large. I feel like in my writing I am pulsating between the micro and macro. Travelling between the extremely specific and the much broader social and political dimension is also how I look at the world as an arts critic.

RB: Fear is the emotional fulcrum of Wolf Moon but you also take the reader on a journey towards beauty and enchantment and a luminosity within or perhaps despite the darkness. I’m curious how you think of the relationship between beauty and fear going forward?

AA: I love that invocation. There’s sort of a flip side to fear, which is excitement. I remember my experience in Sark Island where on the first night I was really scared of the dark and during my night walk but the second night, I gazed at the sky because it was a clear night, and everything looked utterly transcendent. That night I thought darkness was beautiful. When we think of grief or we think of fear we think of them as monolithic but in writing my first book Consumed, I realised that grief had edges of joy. Similarly, the dark and my fear of it is beaded with beauty. It’s got the beauty of the moon, it’s got luminosity. I don’t think it lessens the fear. I don’t think it means that I go out tonight and I’ll be less scared but I’ll observe and know that there is beauty here too. Just like nightingales are not just birds that sing at night, they also sing in the daytime. Darkness and fear have a porousness that allows for joy and beauty to come in.

Wolf Moon is published by Sceptre and out in the UK on 3 July 2025.

Rida Bilgrami is a writer based in London. Her work spans poetry, essays and reported features with a focus on travel, books, visual culture and cities. Read more of Rida’s work on Something Curated here.

Header photograph and portrait by Jocelyn Nguyen.