Maha khan phillips biography of michaels

“I wasn’t setting out to reflect on anyone but to write satire”
– Maha Khan Phillips

Maha Khan Phillips talks to Newsline about writing, reading and her novel, Beautiful From this Angle.

Being a financial journalist, why did you choose to write fiction?

I wanted to write fiction long before I became a financial journalist.

Becoming a financial journalist was a total fluke. It was meant to be something I did short term while I looked for a job in international conflict mediation. But now I’ve been doing it for 11 years and it became interesting once I realised that even in finance it always comes down to the human element — who is winning, who is losing and why do we care?

I used to write fiction, scribble for myself and would have kept doing that as a hobby, but a friend of mine convinced me to do an MA in creative writing at City University in London.

You had to produce a novel in order to graduate. That novel was Beautiful from this Angle.