Sweta Srivastava Vikram

Q. The collection, Saris and a Single Malt really works as a whole piece, with each individual poem moving you along the journey from your mother being unwell, her death, to coming to terms with her death. Was the poetry always with you during this tumultuous time? Poetry and pain never left my side—from the …

Mary Mount on PRH’s #WriteNow initiative

Interview with Mary Mount, a fiction editor at Viking, part of Penguin Random House UK. Mary has published authors including John le Carré, Hisham Matar, Colm Tóibín, Naomi Alderman and Nina Stibbe.   Q. We’re really excited about the #WriteNow initiative. Why is Penguin Random House reaching out to marginalised writers? Books and writers are …

Between two worlds

by Anam Hussain With one foot in the English rain and the other in tropical summer, I hang in between Earlier this year, when one figure changed from five to six, our phones, so unmoved and unaffected, mutely discarded 2015. The BBC hosted a season of identity 2016, a month long series of programmes, exploring …

Sharon Duggal

Q. Tell us a bit about yourself and how you started your writing journey? Like most writers I have always written in one way or another but as a working parent with three children it was never going to be easy to make it a priority, at least not until the kids were a bit …

The Good Immigrant

What are the experiences of a generation born to immigrant parents in the UK? A collection of personal essays edited by Nikesh Shukla and crowdfunded via Unbound explore race in Britain through the eyes of a new wave of creatives: actors, poets, artists and novelists. This smorgasbord of opinion and experiences is refreshing. Each writer …

Streets of Darkness

I admit I was reluctant to pick up A. A. Dhand’s debut novel, Streets of Darkness, even more so, to pen this review. I’ve dipped my toe into the genre of crime fiction before only to find the writing didn’t appeal or to lose myself literally in all the action. But having published Dhand’s blog, …

#PitchCB

#PitchCB is a Twitter pitch party run by Curtis Brown on the fourth Friday of each month. #PitchCB opportunity for writers to pitch their completed works directly to agents. All you need to do is tweet your pitch using the hashtag #PitchCB. If an agent marks your tweet as a favourite you then submit your …

Jasmine

The novel Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee, first published in 1989, is one that is primarily interested in the discussion of immigration experience in the United States. Though utilising fantasy elements in the narrative, the story tells a harrowing tale of the protagonist Jyoti and the challenges she faces in assimilating into American society. The novel …

Abir Mukherjee

As a qualified accountant you came into writing later in life. Tell us more about how and why you decided to become a writer?  My journey from accountant to writer began back in the autumn of 2013. I was thirty-nine at the time, hurtling towards forty and I had the hope that maybe there might …

A. A. Dhand

How important was it for you to set your series in Bradford? It was important to set the series in Bradford, my home town. It is a city with amazing history – a hundred years ago the richest city in Europe. It is a city steeped in glory from the industrial boom days but over …