Monica Ali was born in Dhaka in 1967 to an English mother and Bengali father. At the age of three, during the civil war between East and West Pakistan, that led to the creation of Bangladesh,
she moved to the UK. She grew up in Bolton and attended Bolton Girls’ School. She continued her studies at Wadham College, Oxford, with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and has lived in London since graduating.

She worked in design and as a copywriter, and didn’t begin writing fiction until the age of 31, after the birth of her first child, when she started writing short stories whenever he was taking a nap.
A couple of years later, she began a novel, provisionally entitled Thirteen Seas and Seven Rivers. By this time her son was a toddler and she also had a five-month-old daughter so writing was only possible at night, when they were both asleep. She showed the first four chapters to a friend who had a temporary job at a publishing company and, within a couple of weeks, received the offer of a publishing contract. The novel, which propelled her onto Granta’s list of Best Young British Novelists of the Decade and went on to be translated into thirty languages, was published in 2003 under the title Brick Lane. It was described by The New Republic magazine as ‘a great achievement of the subtlest storytelling’.

Her second book, a novel-in-stories, Alentejo Blue, was set in rural Portugal, a country which she first fell in love with twenty years ago, and where she now spends long summers with her family. It was described by the Sunday Telegraph as ‘A kind of Portuguese version of Under Milk Wood…wise, graceful and supremely elegant.’

In the Kitchen, the third novel, entailed a year’s research in London hotel kitchens, including chopping up a lot of onions. The Sunday Times called it ‘dazzling,’ and the Scotsman said of it,
‘This is a book about what it means to live in the twenty-first century; what it means to be good in this world of moral and political quicksand…
Monica Ali is on top form.’

Monica Ali is a visiting professor of creative writing at Columbia University. She was the chair of the 2011 Asian Man Booker Prize, and is now a member of the Advisory Council. She is a Chair of the judging panel of the Royal Society Winton prize for popular science writing, and a judge for the Guardian First Book Award. Monica is a member of the Board of Trustees of English PEN. She has a number of charity interests including being an active supporter of Oxfam and a patron of the Attlee Youth and Community Centre in Tower Hamlets. When she isn’t reading, writing or playing with her children she is usually practising yoga or walking the dog.