About
Rehab R. Adil
Author · Architect · Artist
My work moves between architecture, painting and writing, three practices bound by the same question: what holds a life together, and what happens in the quiet moments when it doesn't. When Silence Becomes Strength is where I've asked that question in words for the first time.
Architecture and art
Rehab holds a BA (Hons) in Architecture from Kingston University London, graduating with a 2:1. She is the founder of Architects Insight, a platform covering architecture, interior design and the built environment.
As a fine artist working in the surrealist tradition across oil, watercolour, acrylic and mixed media, her work centres on human portraiture and psychological states, examining how emotion, fear and endurance shape the human form. Her ongoing series, Macro & Micro, extends this inquiry through the shifting scale between the human and the cosmic. The painting on this novel's cover is her own work, completed before the book had a first chapter.
The two practices have never been separate for her. Both begin with structure, and both end where structure runs out.
Recognition
- Cambridge Highest Achiever Award, Art & Design, 2018 — the highest mark in the UAE
- Founder of Architects Insight, an architecture and design knowledge platform
On writing this book
There are parts of life no one talks about, but many of us carry anyway: feeling lost in a place that does not know you, carrying more than you thought you could, learning to find your way alone. Running through all of it is faith, the kind that holds you together when everything else gives way. This book began as my way of putting words to that.
This story is for anyone who has ever survived something quietly, for anyone who has ever wondered whether silence is weakness or strength. It is both. And it is neither. It is what you make of it.
More than anything, I wanted this book to be a voice for those who have gone through so much after moving young, international students in particular: to those who never found the words for what they were going through, and to those who carried it all quietly, on their own.
Readers, book clubs, press and publishers are all welcome to write.