Sathnam Sanghera was born to Punjabi immigrant parents in Wolverhampton in 1976. He entered the education system unable to speak English but, after attending Wolverhampton grammar school, graduated from Christ’s College, Cambridge with a first-class degree in English in 1998. He has been shortlisted for the Costa book awards twice, for his memoir, The Boy With the Topknot, and his novel Marriage Material, the former being adapted by BBC Drama in 2017. His new book, Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain, is published by Penguin.
1. Novel
Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford
To make it as a writer, you should find one thing you’re good at. As someone who has written a memoir, a novel and, now, a history book, it’s a rule I’ve failed to follow. And no one makes me feel better about my lack of focus, or magpie mind, than Francis Spufford, whose nonfiction has encompassed everything from polar exploration to postwar Soviet economics. His first novel, Golden Hill, might be my favourite fiction from the past decade; this new one, which follows five Londoners from the second world war to 2009, is just as unpredictable, original and true.
2. Album
I’ve had two of my twentysomething nieces residing with me during successive lockdowns, and while we’ve argued about almost everything, we’ve found common ground on TS. Until this pandemic I’d mainly encountered her via Ryan Adams’s cover versions and the lyrics to London Boy, which were so terrible they went viral. But guess what, she’s a pop genius! The lyrics of Tolerate It are worthy of Joni Mitchell. The tunefulness of Champagne Problems is worthy of George Michael. Needless to say, my nieces count my endorsement as one of the worst things that has ever happened to them.
3. Film
Sound of Metal (Darius Marder, 2019)
Riz Ahmed plays Ruben, a drummer in a rock band on tour who experiences sudden deafness. The soundtrack replicates, for the viewer, something of what such a disability would feel like, while the camera, trained on Ahmed’s face for long periods of time, gradually breaks your heart. Ahmed has some incredible performances under his belt – I rewatched The Night Of last summer and it was even better than I remembered. But this performance – for which he took six months of drum lessons and also learned American Sign Language – is spectacular. I’ll kick off if he doesn’t get an Oscar.
4. Nonfiction
The Anarchy by William Dalrymple
One of the hardest things about British imperial history is getting your head around the East India Company. It was an unusual organisation, beginning as an international trading corporation dealing in silks and spices, and becoming an aggressive colonial power. Dalrymple, arguably the greatest living historian of India, does a great job of showing how, in a few decades, it became an organisation with a private army twice the size of the British army, ruling the subcontinent from anonymous buildings in London. Narrative history doesn’t get much more accessible or engaging.
5. Tech
I hate myself for it, but I need to print things out to edit them. You spot all sorts of errors when you change the medium. This has created various problems for me in the past, from a small thermal printer that cost £500 and only worked twice, to having to walk for miles while on holiday to find a print shop. But finally there is a solution, in the form of this £400 tablet, which is designed to resemble paper and allows you to edit with a special pen, as with a conventional manuscript. Life- and forest- saving.
6. Bar
“What’s the first thing you’ll do after lockdown?” is the pandemic’s “What would you do if you won the lottery?” My answer, after spending a weekend hugging my parents, is to drink a lethal martini in an overpriced bar in St James’s. There are several options, from the Stafford hotel to the Wolseley, but Dukes, where Ian Fleming drank dry martinis and Elgar composed symphonies, is the one I’d pick. It can be fussy and pompous but it’s the exact opposite of drinking supermarket beer in your pyjamas in front of the telly.
