About the Author: Tara Sullivan was born in India and spent her childhood living in Bangladesh, Ecuador, Bolivia, and the Dominican Republic with her parents who were international aid workers. To research Golden Boy, Tara traveled to Tanzania where she interviewed those working to rescue and educate Tanzanian people with albinism. She currently teaches High School Spanish and lives in Malden, Massachusetts. Golden Boy is her first novel.


About Golden Boy: A shocking human rights tragedy brought to light in a story of heartbreak and triumph, Golden Boy tells the story of thirteen-year-old Habo, an albino boy growing up in Tanzania. Always marginalized due to his difference, Habo discovers it’s more dangerous to be seen as priceless than worthless when his family moves to Mwanza and he must flee for his life from people who think his body parts are magical. But fleeing is only the beginning of a journey where Habo must discover his true worth.



Rather than a Twitterview, Tara decided to do a post based on one of my many possible questions. Her question was:  If you’re visually inspired, talk about where you find your sources of inspiration? What movies or pictures most represent your novel or left an impact on you while writing?


I am a VERY visual person. So it only makes sense that, when writing Golden Boy, images played a key role in every step of the process.


Though Golden Boy is fictional, it’s a story based off of a horrifying current reality: the murder and mutilation of people with albinism in Tanzania. As such, the images that propelled me to start, and kept me writing were real ones: the gruesome footage of documentaries; the haunting stares captured by photojournalists; the smiling faces of rescued children on NGO websites.


As I wrote, I kept a collage of images that spoke to me posted above my desk: pictures of the settings that I found online, and images of people who were displaying the emotions I needed to draw on when I was writing.


Once I had written a first draft I traveled to Tanzania and traced the path of the story. In every location I tried to soak in the smells and the sounds and took thousands of digital pictures. When I got home, those pictures (coupled with my copious notes on things like the color of the dust and my hand-drawn street maps) were what allowed me to attack revision with a new fervor.


When I got my editorial letter and my editor asked for a deepening of my secondary characters, I hit a brick wall until it occurred to me to find pictures of them and do a writing exercise where I wrote each of their stories. Looking at their faces (evocative faces found on Google images) was what finally allowed me to understand how they would react in a story where they didn’t see themselves as “secondary,” and therefore write them more fully.


My final visual for Golden Boy is my amazing cover art by Jesse Joshua Watson. We discussed various aspects of the cover through a series of his sketches and I ended up with the stunning cover you see on the book: one that perfectly captures Habo’s sensitivity as well as his wariness. I couldn’t be happier with this, the final image my book will be judged by.


Thanks for reading and, if you’d like to see some of the footage and photos that inspired me for yourself, please head on over to my blog: http://sullivanstories.com and click on the “Resources for Teachers” tab. Under “Albinism in Tanzania,” you’ll find the media that inspired me for Golden Boy. Under the “Golden Boy,” tab you can see Jesse Joshua Watson’s powerful cover art and, scattered around the rest of it, you can find the pictures I took while traveling to Tanzania.

Find out more about Tara Sullivan’s Golden Boy on Goodreads.