Celebrating Britain's 101 Most Influential Asians 2021

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Sathnam Sanghera


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HE COULDN’T speak English when he started school but Sathnam Sanghera certainly caught up fast.

The son of Punjabi immigrants, he’d go on to get a first class degree in English language and literature at Christ’s College, Cambridge, become a columnist for The Times, write a clutch of highly acclaimed books and be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

His smash hit memoir, The Boy with the Topknot, which was made into a film, is a moving account of a second generation Indian man growing up in Britain. His novel Marriage Material is being adapted for the stage by awardwinning playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti.

His latest book, Empireland, published in 2021, is a non fiction work that continues to explore what it means to be British in 21st century multicultural Britain.

In it, Sanghera argues that much of what we consider to be modern Britain is actually rooted in our imperial past – a past that is frequently hidden from view but which he argues should be brought more into the open.

“Our history of empire explains so much about us – our politics, our psychology, our sense of exceptionalism, our wealth (to a certain degree) and, of course, our multiculturalism. The reason we are a multicultural society is because we had a multicultural empire,” he says.

Meanwhile, he has continued to make waves with his journalism and broadcasting. For eight years, he wrote for The Financial Times, and has been a Times columnist and feature writer since 2007. He is also a regular contributor to radio and TV, having appeared on programmes, including Have I Got News For You and BBC’s Front Row Late. He has also presented a range of documentaries, including the highly acclaimed Massacre That Shook The Empire on Channel 4.

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