Layla is currently writing her first book, a non-fiction part biography, part memoir about her father’s political career during a seminal period in Arab revolutionary history and her upbringing among London’s international intelligentsia and balancing multiple identities.
Layla’s father, Mahmood Maghribi, was born in Palestine to Libyan parents who had fled the Italian occupation of their home country in the early 20th Century. Mahmood was fated to repeat the exile experience of his parents when in 1948 he became a Palestinian refugee in Syria following the occupation of Palestine and creation of Israel. Decades later, Mahmood retraced his ancestors in Libya and became actively involved in the increasingly popular anti-monarchist, pan-Arabist, pro-democratic republicanism of the time and which landed him in a prison in Tripoli for three years. A month after his release in 1969, Mahmood became the first Prime Minister of Libya’s new republic following the military coup led by one notorious Moammar Qhadaffi. The political partnership between Mahmood and Moammar was short-lived and the former went on to found the first foreign-based Libyan opposition group in London, becoming in the process a political dissident in exile.
Set across Libya, Palestine, Syria and the UK, Layla’s family history tells a wider story of late-stage imperialism, the post-colonial era and of the displacement, activism, politicisation, revolution, persecution, hope and despair it ushered forward.
Layla is represented by Anna Pallai at AMP agency.
