Anar Ali quit her corporate job and created a hit cop drama

CBC

3 days ago

When Anar Ali quit her corporate job to pursue her creative passions, she could never have imagined having the success she has today.
Ali is the creator and executive producer of the hit Canadian cop drama Allegiance, which recently got greenlit for a third season. But her path to working in television was anything but linear.
More than 25 years ago, Ali was a business development executive at Procter & Gamble where she found herself quickly moving up the corporate ladder. One day, while walking home in downtown Calgary, she noticed a pamphlet on the ground for the Writers' Guild of Alberta.
Ali had been interested in writing since she was a kid, so on a whim, she decided to attend one of the guild's conferences in Banff. Though she was nervous at first, she felt so at home among the writers at the conference that she burst into tears. It was there that she also made a life-changing connection with Canadian literary star Shyam Selvadurai, who's best known as the author of the bestselling novel Funny Boy.
"We started chatting [and] we ended up going for a drink," Ali recalls in an interview with Q guest host Gill Deacon. "When he signed his book to me, it said, 'Dear Anar, take the plunge' … That was Saturday. On Monday, I went in and quit [my job]."
But Procter & Gamble wasn't ready to let go of one of their star employees that easily. They offered Ali an opportunity to work for four days per week, with one day off to focus on her writing. She did that for a year until she realized she needed an even bigger life change.
"This decision of becoming a writer really showed the fault lines in my marriage," she says. "I really realized I was not living the life I wanted…. So one decision led to another. And it did come to that point where I was like, 'What am I doing?'"
After Ali left her job and her marriage, she spent time travelling before eventually moving to Toronto where she lived off of her savings. She describes her past self as being "sweetly naive" about the difficulties she would have to face without a stable income, but she persevered.
Eventually, Ali enrolled in an MFA program at the University of British Columbia, where she completed her first book, Baby Khaki's Wings.
"I do feel really fortunate to have gone to UBC, have gotten in there as a new writer, and had this amazing support system to help me get there," she says. "After you graduate from that school, agents come knocking — and that's what happened to me. And then Penguin asked for the second book. And that way, it set me onto a trajectory."