‘Publishing is a dream, but this has also been one of the hardest years of my life ’: Palestinian author Yasmin Zaher

The novelist has been awarded the Dylan Thomas prize for young writers. She talks about giving up medical training to pursue fiction – and the childhood memories that inspired her winning debut, The Coin

Buying a Birkin bag is not easy. You can’t just waltz into an Hermès store and pluck one off the shelf, even if you’re prepared to drop the many thousands required to pay for it. “The great majority of people are refused a Birkin, they get told that there aren’t any available in the store, which is a lie, they just don’t want to give it to them,” explains the protagonist of Palestinian writer Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel The Coin, which this month won the Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize for authors aged 39 or under.

Zaher’s unnamed narrator, a Palestinian woman living in New York, has to get to grips with Hermès’s exclusive and elusive sales policies – which seem to privilege loyal customers – after being drawn into a Birkin reselling operation.