Hannah Alkaf was 10 years old and found a very close bond to books. She had explored many Enid Blyton books and felt very close to them. She read a book called dancing shoes which was based in England (like most of the books she was reading that time) and had a reference to Malaysia, her home country, that reference excited her a lot, she just loved the fact that Malaysia is not invisible to these people, and they know about her home country. Growing up she read more and more books, stealing some from her brother and sisters, which exposed her to different types of texts. This gave her a better understanding of the structure and how different texts work. She remembers going to the book shop and being able to choose out a new book as a reward for good behaviour. She would choose out a new book the series she would be reading. Being excited about the new purchase, she would start reading the new book on the way back home. Her father wouldn’t be very pleased about this which ended up in a ban for her to read books in the car. Reading books was in her family’s blood. All of her family members had their own books shelves, and each bookshelf would be containing one type of genre, as each of them had a preference. She started to write books at the age of 17. One of the books she read was Gila, which means crazy in Malay. This was one of the books which she wrote very passionately because she wrote about a topic which people in Malaysia do not like talking about… mentally disabled people. She wrote about how they were treated in Malaysia and the fact that she doesn’t like they are disregarded from the community.
We had a second session with Ms Hannah Alkaf. This session taught us how to make our writing more intriguing to the reader. She taught the listeners about emotion, and how to evoke strong feelings of emotion, which techniques to use to make the reader feel strongly about an emotion. String feelings get evoked when fine details and description is defined.