Saffia Farr graduated from Exeter University in England and worked as a construction lawyer in London. At the age of twenty-six she abandoned her career and moved to southern Egypt with Matthew, a water engineer working on aid projects. There she retrained as a housewife and started writing; jotting notes in journals becoming therapy against the loneliness of ex-pat life.
After two years they were posted to Kyrgyzstan, a country Saffia had barely heard of. She was fifteen weeks pregnant with their first child and apprehensive about finding appropriate ante-natal care in a place so remote. After an anxious start she learnt to love Kyrgyzstan, a journey of discovery told with compassion and humour in her book Revolution Baby: Motherhood and Anarchy in Kyrgyzstan.
Saffia now lives in a converted cowshed in England with her three children and Matthew, when he isn’t designing sewers in unknown places. Her writing has appeared in the Weekly Telegraph, Traveller, Voyager, Bumps and Beyond, Juno and Open Central Asia and she has a monthly column in Nursery World. Saffia’s photographs are widely used in the third edition of the Odyssey Guide to the Kyrgyz Republic and she contributed a chapter to the award winning anthology Call Me Okaasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering.
Saffia gives talks in book shops, libraries and primary schools about Kyrgyzstan and her experiences there and welcomes the opportunity to meet with book clubs and discuss Revolution Baby with readers.
Revolution Baby is her first book and has been well received, described by Wanderlust magazine as “a great read” and by Katie Hickman, author of Daughters of Britannia as “one of the best [accounts of ex-pat life] I have read; equally, if not more, entertaining than a regular travel book”.