FAQs

+ Where are you really from?

I was born in Dhaka, East Pakistan, in 1967 and came to the UK at the age of three, during the civil war that led to the creation of Bangladesh. My mother is English and my father is Bengali. I grew up in Bolton. I left Bolton when I was eighteen to go to university, and since graduating I have lived in London. I’d describe myself as British, of Bangladeshi and English heritage, and as a Londoner.

You can read more about my life here.

+ Did you always want to be a writer?

When I was growing up, I always had my head in a book. Novels were an escape (from a tense household, from loneliness); they were my only means of travel; they schooled me in ways that school couldn’t. People talk of ‘losing yourself’ in a novel. As an adolescent reader that’s exactly what I was often longing – and able – to do. The more I disappeared the better. I think that’s why I write now, to have that experience of immersing myself in another perspective on life. But I didn’t consider, back then, that I might be able to write a novel. If people like me got novels published, I’d never managed to find them!

+ How did you get started?

As a baby, my son woke frequently during the night. He’d go back to sleep, but I’d find it difficult to fall asleep again. So I decided I’d try to use those silent small hours to do something constructive. I began by writing short stories. When my daughter was born, a couple of years later, I had an idea for a novel. With a new baby, a toddler, and very little in the way of childcare, it seemed a bit crazy to even try to write a book. But then my maternal grandfather died. We went to the funeral, and the day after that I began writing the novel. I just had that sense of life being short, of how I might regret it if I never made a serious attempt to write.

+ Were you surprised by the success of your debut novel, Brick Lane?

I was surprised that it got published! I was writing about a Bangladeshi housewife in the East End of London. It was hardly a hot topic, definitely not back then. It wasn’t ‘multicultural-cool’ either. It was, more or less, monocultural. But what I came to realise as the book was published in different countries and I met readers in all those places, is that people responded to the immigrant story whether they were New Yorkers with Russian heritage or Australians with Greek heritage, or German or French readers perhaps trying to understand something of the experience of more recent arrivals. Ultimately, though, I think that what spoke to readers no matter their background, were things like family dynamics, trying to find one’s place in the world, the yearning for respect, the battle between personal freedom and performing one’s duty. I may be wrong, but I suspect those universal elements – albeit in a relatively new guise – were integral to the book’s success.

+ What kind of resarch do you do for your novels?

I love the research phase. Compared to writing it’s a walk in the park. The kind of research varies, depending on the book. For instance, when I was writing about Gabriel, my protagonist in In The Kitchen, I did a lot of research about chefs and commercial kitchens. I read extensively, and also spent long days in hotel kitchens, shadowing people or working alongside them. For Brick Lane, as well as reading up, I spent time in the area, hung out at women’s centres, interviewed youth workers, and so on. But research is about knowing, and knowing is easy. Anyone who cared to could have found out that there was overcrowding and drug abuse in the Bangladeshi community in London’s East End. You didn’t even have to go there. You only needed to know how to use a search engine.

The task for the fiction writer is not to know. The task is much more difficult. It is to imagine. And research gives you the courage to make things up. It helps you with the hard stuff, which is ‘getting under the skin’ of your characters. How do you sink into the character? All the knowledge in the world won’t necessarily get you there.

+ How did the idea for Love Marriage come about?

Love Marriage is about two very different families, the Ghoramis and the Sangsters, who are thrown together after a whirlwind engagement, between Yasmin and Joe. They’re both junior doctors, but they come from very different backgrounds.

The idea grew out of two separate stories I was playing around with. I was developing the character of a young Asian woman in one of them, and in the other, I had an older, white, north London ‘liberal luvvie’. But wasn’t convinced I’d end up writing either book. It was only when I thought about putting the two families together that it caught fire for me, and I knew this was something I wanted to write. When I think of novels about love and marriage, the first writer who comes to mind is Jane Austen. And I guess I have a debt to her for my book. Because her novels are all about engagements and marriage, and through that supposedly narrow prism, ‘confined’ to the domestic sphere, we learn so much about the culture of the time. How society worked in terms of money – she’s very precise about who has how much – class, and power relations, including the position of women. In Love Marriage, the context of course is very different in today’s Britain. Yasmin is a doctor, there’s a storyline within the hospital and we’re in a multiracial landscape. But the expectations, customs, rituals and family dynamics surrounding marriage are still a good way of exploring our society.