As a foreign correspondent for CNN, Atia Abawi often covered war zones. Here she reviews security briefing materials while traveling on a military helicopter to Kunar Province in northeastern Afghanistan. (Photo courtesy of Atia Abawi)

One evening while watching the news, Atia Abawi was struck by the faces of young Syrian refugees. It was 2015, and she was curled up in her Jerusalem apartment nursing her infant son.

“I was watching mothers and fathers pushing strollers along busy European highways and through muddy fields,” she says. “They were placing their babies in rubber dinghies that could sink at any moment. And I thought about how blessed I was that my parents had taken that same risk more than 30 years earlier.”

Abawi’s parents fled Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion in 1979, a month before her birth. They eventually found refuge in the United States. “If my parents hadn’t decided to leave when they did,” she says, “I wouldn’t have been in this safe, comfortable apartment taking care of my child.”

At the time of the news broadcast, Abawi had been working on a different book, but she switched her focus to the plight of Syrian refugees. She traveled to Turkey and then to Greece to conduct research. On Lesbos Island, she saw remnants of families who had taken the perilous journey.

“I saw thousands and thousands of lifejackets, along with battered boats and lost baby clothes,” she says. “It was jarring and depressing and gutting.”

She also saw a cemetery dotted everywhere with fresh mounds of dirt, some just large enough to cover a child. “People were literally dying in their struggle to survive,” she says. “But staying behind was a much worse option.”

Growing up, Abawi had always dreamed of being a journalist. After graduating from Virginia Tech with a communication degree in 2004, she joined CNN, where she eventually became the international correspondent for Afghanistan. But as a broadcast journalist, she says, she had at most two minutes to share a story. She decided to turn to novels.

Her first book, the critically acclaimed The Secret Sky, is set in contemporary Afghanistan. Her second, A Land of Permanent Goodbyes, follows a young Syrian refugee and his family. Both Iowa and Texas have chosen the book for their statewide reading programs.

“With my novels, I’ve been able to go deeper into the stories,” Abawi says. “I’ve been able to share the truth in a way I could never do as a journalist.”

This article appeared in Illumination, the magazine of the Virginia Tech College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences.