Alif The Unseen author trusts fantasy to tell a true tale

American writer G. Willow Wilson is winning rave reviews for Alif The Unseen, a fantasy novel set during the Arab Spring.

Yet when she first began writing about Internet-fuelled political revolutions, early readers dismissed the idea as pure speculative fiction.

That was back in 2010, a year before crowds mobilised in Cairo to oust then-president Hosni Mubarak.

Wilson, 31, worked as a high school teacher in Cairo between 2003 and 2007 and realised early on that the growing online community in the Middle East was allowing citizens living under oppressive regimes to speak freely about politics.