I am a second-generation British Asian. Like so many of my generation, my parents arrived from Punjab – India in the 1960s, carrying with them a determination to build a life in a country that was still largely unfamiliar to them. I was born here, grew up here, went to school here, then college and university, and for much of my early life I moved comfortably between two worlds without ever quite feeling that either one completely belonged to me.

I began writing short stories when I took my first teaching job at a sixth-form college. It was there, standing in front of classrooms filled with young people, that I began to notice something that troubled me, that many of the Asian students simply did not read.

At first, it was easy to assume that they simply had little interest in books, that reading was something they had never discovered a taste or appetite for. But the more I watched them and, more importantly, the more I listened, the more I began to realise that the problem was not that they did not want to read, but that they had so rarely been given a reason to see themselves in what they were reading. The stories placed before them belonged to other lives. The characters had different names, different families, different homes and different histories; they inhabited worlds that felt distant and unfamiliar, carrying memories and experiences that had little connection to their own.

Books, for many of these young people, had become windows looking out onto somebody else’s world, when what they perhaps needed was a mirror in which, for once, they could recognise something of themselves.

So, I started writing stories with Asian characters and Asian experiences. Nothing particularly grand or ambitious at first. I simply wanted to put people like them onto the page: young Asian men and women with complicated families, awkward friendships, cultural expectations, arguments with their parents, dreams of their own and the ordinary, sometimes funny, sometimes painful experiences of growing up between cultures.

Perhaps, without realising it at the time, I wasn’t simply trying to get them to read. I was trying to give them a doorway into literature, and to show them that their lives, their families, their voices and their experiences were worthy of being turned into stories too.

www.lightbreeze.co.uk <http://www.lightbreeze.co.uk/>

www.analoguefilmacademy.co.uk <http://www.analoguefilmacademy.co.uk/>

Filmmaking is where every frame, every sound, and every silence is creatively shaped. It demands significant logistical support, people, funding, equipment, and coordination.

Writing lies in its independence, as the only essential resource is one’s own imagination.

Two volumes of short stories will soon be published by Bite-Sized Books:

VOLUME 1 – Thirteen Short Stories, The Strange Things We Discover

VOLUME 2 – Eleven Short Stories, The Curious Lives We Lead