womanthismonth.com | DECEMBER 2025 INTERVIEW 27 When British-Emirati singer-songwriter and filmmaker Layla Kaylif joined a meeting of Bahrain Rotarians, the conversation meandered from Shakespeare and censorship to karaoke nights in Manama. The session offered a rare live encounter with an artist who moves between Dubai, London and the global festival circuit yet still describes herself as an outsider. Kaylif is best known for Shakespeare in Love, the 1999 single that became an enduring favourite across parts of Asia. She is described as an English-Arab singer-songwriter and a Pop Poet, a label that reflects her blend of melodic ease and literary sensibility. Born in Dubai to an English mother and an Emirati father, she grew up in what she calls Old Dubai, a period when the city still felt more like a small town than an international crossroads. British television played in the living room, horses filled her childhood weekends and her relatives moved fluidly between Arabic and English. The result, she told the Bahrain audience, was a lifelong state of being between categories, neither fully English nor neatly Arab. That layered identity runs through her work. After studying acting in the United States and Arabic at Oxford, she released albums that drift across pop, folk and Americana, culminating in Lovers Don’t Meet, recorded in Nashville. She resists being labelled as singer, director or actor, insisting that each form is simply another way to tell stories and inhabit different selves. Her most ambitious story to date is The Letter Writer, a romantic drama set in 1960s Old Dubai. The film follows a young man who composes letters for illiterate townspeople and falls in love with the woman whose love notes he is paid to write. The project won the IWC Filmmaker Award at the Dubai International Film Festival and later became a feature now available on streaming platforms. For Kaylif it is also an act of remembrance, drawing on the Dubai of her father’s stories, pearl-trading ancestors and her own teenage summer job as a letter writer. If Shakespeare in Love showcased her pop instincts, her more recent work has sharpened her political voice. As an ambassador for Defence for Children International she wrote and recorded War on Children for World Children’s Day, highlighting the experiences of young people living through conflict. She told Bahrain Rotarians that some songs are rants in disguise, crafted ways to express moral urgency without exposing personal disputes or turning suffering into spectacle. Kaylif remains alert to the complexities that surround artistic freedom. Shakespeare, she notes, worked under censorship and those constraints often demanded creativity rather than blunt messaging. The point resonates with her own past as a woman from a conservative Arab family who once changed her surname to protect relatives from the social disapproval that still shadows female performers in parts of the region. Today she divides her time between London and Dubai, writing new music and developing a contemporary adaptation of Antony and Cleopatra she hopes to film in Georgia. Her conversation with Bahrain Rotarians was a reminder that culture thrives when it moves across borders, unsettles tidy ideas of identity and, every so often, turns a quiet rant into a song that lingers long after the call ends.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy Mjk0MTkxMQ==