'Writing in the City of Roses' by Amanda Addison

‘Our horizons have expanded and become global and universal.’

Norwich-based writer Amanda Addison reflects on her writing retreat in Saudi Arabia. In November 2025, Taif UNESCO City of Literature provided ten writers with a calm and inspiring writing environment, where they drew on Taif’s culture and heritage to influence their work.

Here, Amanda writes on the experience and the found family she made along the way.

Late November and a blanket of cloud descends over Heathrow Airport. The grey pavements are shiny and wet. Today, like a migrating bird, a common theme to my writing, I begin my journey south to Taif, Saudi Arabia.

My hosts have booked me on a six-and-a-half-hour flight to Riyadh, the kingdom’s capital, from there I fly west to Taif, the regional airport which serves Mecca.

I am seated between two women wearing black abeyas. The woman to my right is chatty. She’s returning home from visiting her daughter in Cardiff who is studying engineering. We scroll through our phones and share family photos before fastening our seat belts. Alongside safety a traditional travel prayer is recited before take off. Before ascending over London, I already feel I have very much left the UK and entered another world.

We enter Saudi air space and a glorious orange sunset against a blue sky comes into view. My seat is at the back of the plane, adjacent the prayer room – a curtained off area where the middle aisle seats have been taken out. There is now a queue. The silent prayers turn to an audible recitation ringing out against the hum of the engines. Night falls as we fly eastwards across the empty desert to the illuminated grid plan city of Riyadh. We touch down. ‘I love my country,’ says the woman next to me, excited to be home.

Onwards and another flight to Taif, perched almost 2,500 metres above sea level. After that, we drive through the night to Ash Shafa a summer mountain resort and my home for the next week is a rose-pink dry-stone bungalow set in gardens full of fig and plum trees. I share my place to write with Alina, a writer from the Ukraine.

Over breakfast in the garden, I meet the nine other novelists in search of both solitude and community to finish their novels. We are all ages from other cities of Literature: Jakarta, Beijing, Kyiv, Kolicut, Barcelona, Edinburgh – and I fly the flag for Norwich.

Abdulaziz, from the Ministry of Culture takes us for a walk in the hills. He tells us about the changes, the liberalisation the Kingdom has gone through since 2019. Saudi Arabia has a 2030 vision to open up to tourists and become less oil dependant. We are some of the first visitors. We are well looked after by Sara and Amani whose work began with the logistics of getting ten authors from across the world to this small resort in the mountains. These two women are our also drivers. Amani and I talk of running; she offers to come with me. When she shows me photos of her Marathon races I decide to take my morning jog alone for fear of humiliation. I am grateful the local monkeys – who raided a picnic the day before – aren’t up to hoot and howl at my efforts to run at this high elevation.

There is more wildlife when we travel to a deserted hilltop village where our guide lived as a child before the road came. The stone, slate and mud houses resemble a fortress on a hill. ‘Look! There are wolves!’ shouts Alina, my housemate from Kyiv.

‘Really?’ In the distance and an adult followed by their pup heads up the distant golden mountainside.

‘Yes, they are wolves. We have them in Ukraine,’ she adds.

Our similarities and differences make for lively discussions on ‘what is a novel?’ Mazin Alhathi, Dean of Taif University is our mentor. He chairs informal discussions – and nostalgically recounts his time in Leeds, where he studied for his PHD. Muzafar, a former journalist from Kerala is the group’s comedian. He jokes, ‘Everyone here is a doctor, and we are their patients.’

Our writers WhatsApp group fills with thoughts.

Back in Ash Shafa our days fall into a routine, solitary writing is punctuated by our al fresco three meals a day. Sunrise prayer gives way to a blue sky and frost. Breakfast is in the Goldilocks Zone of temperate weather, lunch and we wear sun hats and scarves against the fierce sun. We eat Kabsa, a Saudi specialty of chicken with rice cooked in milk and aromatic spices alongside other Gulf and Levantine favourites: hummus, aubergine and flat bread. By evening we eat wearing layers of winter clothes. The participants from Indonesia have never experienced such low temperatures and our Indian colleagues wrap up in padded jackets and woolly hats. For this is an outdoor society where people once lived in tents and still gather in cafes around fire pits.

We visit Taif city, city of roses, for a shopping trip. Shops sell honey, dates, rose tea, rose perfume, and rose honey. There is a large stone sculpture of a rose. It is the size of a small house and an artistic and engineering feat. In the language of flowers pink roses are for gratitude.

The weekend arrives on Thursday evening. The roads which are empty by day are chocker-block at midnight. We head to samta – a weekend festival which runs until February. We get out of the car and walk final few metres to the entrance. We are the VIPs and ushered past the queues and given a festival wristband. The big stage has a carousel of musicians and people dance and celebrate the end of the working week. The stage is surrounded by cafes. And we sit and drink golden coloured Saudi coffee (with hints of Saffron and crushed cardamom). Families and friends are enjoying themselves. ‘Welcome to Saudi Arabia,’ they say intrigued by their international visitors at this local festival where the word Samta means joy. And the music falls into a trance like rhythm. We leave in the early hours.

Friday morning and it is quiet – the weekend. Our last day together. Bitter-sweet to leave my new writing family for my family back home. We have bonded and become a tight team of ten. Orbital, the prize-winning novel about life on the International Space Station is my bedtime read, and I am struck by the similarities with living at the retreat. We are away from our familiar countries, in another time and space in this other-worldly desert landscape of rose-coloured mountains and craters. The black Ka’ba, which many believe to be a meteorite, is just down the road in Mecca. Our horizons have expanded and become global and universal.

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