Birth— 1981
Where—Derbyshire, UK
Raised in— Derbyshire
Education—Imperial College London
Currently—UK

Bibliography

• The Year of the Runaways (2015)

• Ours are the Streets (2011)

   

Sunjeev Sahota was born in 1981 and grew up in Chesterfield, Derbyshire.

His background is Sikh, and his paternal grandparents emigrated from the Punjab region of India in 1966. After finishing school, Sahota studied mathematics at Imperial College London.

Sahota had not encountered a novel until he was 18, when he read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

After Midnight’s Children, Sahota went on to read The God of Small Things, A Suitable Boy and The Remains of the Day. In an interview in January 2011, he stated:

It was like I was making up for lost time – not that I had to catch up, but it was as though I couldn’t quite believe this world of storytelling I had found and I wanted to get as much of it down me as I possibly could.

In 2013 he was included in a Granta list of 20 best young writers, released 20 years after the magazine first published such a list.

Sahota’s first novel, Ours are the Streets, was published in January 2011 by Picador. He wrote the book in the evenings and at weekends because of his day job. The novel tells the story of a British Pakistani youth who becomes a suicide bomber.

Sahota was prompted to start writing the book by the 7 July 2005 London bombings. According to the Sheffield Telegraph, the book is “being mentioned in literary supplements as one of the novels to look out for in 2011”. Ours are the Streets has been reviewed in a number of national newspapers, including The Times, The Guardian, The Independent and The Sunday Times.

His second novel, The Year of the Runaways, about the experience of illegal immigrants in Britain, was published in June 2015 and was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize.

The Year of the Runaways
Sunjeev Sahota
There’s a strange whiff of mistrust in these British isles around the description “political novel”; it’s a term sometimes confused with polemic, and an absence of nuance and subtlety. Sunjeev Sahota’s second novel makes a nonsense of common assumptions about what it means to write a political novel.

Ours Are the Streets
Sunjeev Sahota
Here’s another suicide bomber novel seeking to explain Islamist violence as a form of mental illness. We’ve had Amis and Updike’s uninformed attempts, plus variations on the theme from Sebastian Faulks. This time, though not of Muslim background, our author is a British-Asian and he does have some important insights into the anguished inbetweenness