Books
Sikh-Briton Hailed as One of Best Young Novelists in Britain:
Sunjeev Singh Sahota
LARRY ROHTER
Every 10 years since 1983, the prestigious London-based literary magazine Granta names the 20 writers it considers the Best of Young British Novelists.
The list has come to be regarded as a bellwether in the literary world, since so many of the writers singled out at that early stage of their careers -- starting with Martin Amis, Pat Barker and Salman Rushdie -- have gone on to great critical and commercial success.
On Monday (April 15, 2013) night, in a ceremony broadcast on the BBC, Granta announced its fourth list, and named Sikh-Briton, Sunjeev Singh Sahota, as one of the 20 ’Best Young British Novelists’ of this decade.
Sunjeev, according to John Freeman, the editor of Granta, "had never read a novel until he was 18 – until he bought Midnight's Children at Heathrow. He studied maths, he works in marketing and finance; he lives in Leeds, completely out of the literary world."
Sunjeev’s first novel, “Ours are the Streets“, was about the journey to radicalisation of a young British Muslim. His forthcoming work, said Freeman, "is like his ninth novel, it's such a huge leap forward".
Born in 1981, Sunjeev is currently working on his second novel, “The Year of the Runaways.”
Son of Sikh-Britons who immigrated from Punjab, he has even managed to combine both the foreign and regional streams in his work. The excerpt submitted to the Granta jury on his behalf, from the second novel he is now writing, is called “Arrivals” and examines what he calls “the hidden lives” of migrants from India, many of them in Britain illegally, working construction in the northern cities of Sheffield and Leeds.
[Courtesy: New York Times & The Guardian. Edited for sikhchic.com]
April 16, 2013