HE COULDN’T speak English when he started school but Sathnam Sanghera certainly caught up fast in life.
Born to Punjabi parents in the West Midlands in 1976, he went on to get a first class degree in English language and literature at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and became a columnist for The Times in 2007. He has written a clutch of highly acclaimed books and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2016.
His latest smash hit, Empireland, published in 2021, is a non-fiction work that explores what it means to be British in 21st century multicultural Britain. The Sunday Times bestseller has recently been shortlisted for the UK’s Parliamentary Book Awards under the category of – Political Book by a Non-Parliamentarian. The work, published by Penguin Random House/Viking, is due for US publication in 2022 by Pantheon.
In the book, 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 said.
His other highly acknowledged work includes The Boy with the Topknot, which was made into a film. The book is a moving account of a second generation Indian man growing up in Britain. Besides, his novel Marriage Material was adapted for the stage by award-winning playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti. While working on these projects, Sanghera has always made waves with journalism and broadcasting. For eight years, he wrote for The Financial Times and continues to write for The Times.
He is also a regular contributor to radio and TV, having appeared on programmes, including Have I Got News For You and BBC Front Row Late. He has also presented a range of documentaries, including the highly acclaimed Massacre That Shook The Empire on Channel 4.
As a journalist on the so-called mainstream media, how does he feel when he hears that term used in a pejorative way by the growing number of people who believe in populist conspiracy theories? Sanghera said: “Depressed. But also galvanised because it is a fight worth having. If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition…our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.”
His brilliantly witty Covid diaries about lockdown in the company of his two Generation Z nieces, who camped at his small flat for two months, kept Times readers entertained for weeks and went viral on social media. “Infuriatingly, they suffered little more than losing their senses of smell and taste and tested positive for (Covid) antibodies, whereas I had three weeks of aches and fever and tested negative.”
On working from home, he told Times readers: “I’ve said it already, but people raving about the wonder of remote working from the comfort of their large houses with gardens need to look beyond themselves. The repercussions of the death of office life are going to be felt for a generation.” Before becoming a writer, Sanghera worked at a burger chain, a hospital laundry, a market research firm, a sewing factory and for a literacy project in New York.