Monica Ali

Ali was born in Dhaka to a Bangladeshi father and an English mother and came to Bolton at three, when the family left during the 1971 war. Granta named her among its Best of Young British Novelists in 2003 on the strength of an unpublished manuscript, before Brick Lane had appeared at all, which is unusual and brought attention she has said she did not enjoy. Love Marriage, in 2022, came after more than a decade away and sets two families against each other around an engagement: a Bengali Muslim household in which nothing is discussed, and a white liberal one in which everything is, at length and in public. It is funnier than her reputation suggests.