Show Notes
Screenwriter, artist and Murky Book Prize-winning novelist Sufiyaan Salam reads the opening chapters of Wimmy Road Boyz: three young men in a BMW, cruising towards Manchester's Curry Mile at the start of a night that none of them yet know might be their last together.
Sufiyaan and Freya talk about writing as a kind of method acting, how he inhabits his characters so completely that when they're in trouble, he is too, and the film-set principle of "method dressing" that shapes his approach to prose: build the parts of the room the camera will never see, because the reality bleeds through anyway. They discuss the histories buried in the text, from Tipu Sultan to Manto's Toba Tek Singh to Islamic Spain and Partition, and why he likes leaving them there as either a treasure trove or simply texture that feels real. And they talk about the pressure of being one of very few British Pakistani male literary novelists — and why he'd rather write questions than be anyone's spokesman.
This is a conversation about the last night of being young, the work behind effortlessness, and why novels ask rather than answer.
00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:08 Wimmy Road Boyz Passage Reading Chapter 1: three boys drive towards the Curry Mile 00:04:40 Wimmy Road Boyz Passage Reading Chapter 2: the homeless man 00:09:28 The first chapter that barely changed 00:12:06 "Method dressing": building what the camera won't see, and Martin Scorsese 00:13:43 Writing as method acting 00:14:09 Hidden histories: Tipu Sultan, Manto and Partition 00:16:06 The last night of being young 00:17:18 Can you come of age at any age? 00:19:55 Why he doesn't want to be a British-Asian spokesman
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