I wanted to create narratives that feel real and that move people because I’m from a community that is underrepresented, but also underprivileged and misunderstood – not just in terms of race – but in class and culture and community.” My characters - much to the dismay of the students I teach every day at a school in Bradford - are not based on anyone in particular. Yet they are an amalgamation of everyone I have met, seen, spoken to, and not spoken to. I think that it is the job of the writer to bottle magic.

I want people to recognise the humanity of people and qualities that can seem abrasive, or angry, but are actually just misunderstood” There is an essay by Zadie Smith called "Speaking In Tongues" which I still refer to constantly. Even six years after graduating from university, where I sat in the book-strewn refectory room of my old Cambridge college, and looked at it for the very first time.

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Sara Jafari, Editor, says: ‘A coming of age story for our times, Good For Nothing is a snapshot into the lives of three teenagers, Amir, Kemi and Eman, and explores the highs and lows of what it’s like to grow up as people of colour in the North of England – which we so rarely see. As soon as we read this all of us at Puffin knew we had something seriously special on our hands. Good For Nothing is emotional and heart-breaking – but also funny and relatable – and completely unlike anything I have read before. We are so proud to be the publisher launching Mariam’s writing career as a new literary talent to watch.’ What kind of challenges did you face within the publishing industry and do you have any advice for Muslim writers on how to overcome them? Though the narrative changed after these initial thoughts, Zayd’s death did end up becoming the catalyst for the entire novel. Good For Nothing is a coming-of-age story which follows three teens grappling with grief and police prejudice in the north of England. It is a “rich and warmly written” novel exploring the power of friendship and human connection. I am unsure if the silent majority recognises what stories they live every day. Certainly the young child that I was on my grandma’s street, arm in arm with a neighbour with the same name, face, and stance as my own, wouldn’t.

Bradfordian Mariam Ansar found it difficult to relate to fellow Muslims in Cambridge (MEE/Mohamad Elaasar) There are a few genres which always come up when you’re searching for a Muslim-centric narrative. Certain tropes that are somehow palatable to the publishing industry: a love letter to every forgotten northern town, every young person of colour that has struggled to feel understood” I went to mingling events with other British-born Muslims - naively expecting some camaraderie - and found that saying you’re from Bradford got its own set of laughs. Some non-funny jokes. Everyone in your ears: kasmey (I swear), yara (man!), bro. After all, the tradition of Muslim characters is nothing if not interesting: Shakespeare’s Othello is -in some interpretations - ambiguously racialised as deriving from Muslim Spain. Shelley’s Frankenstein features orientalised depictions of the Ottoman Empire in the passive, submissive Safie.The synopsis reads: “Eman is the awkward girl whose favourite evenings are spent at home watching soaps with her Nani. Amir is the angry boy who won’t talk about the brother he lost but won’t let his name be forgotten either. Kemi is fast and fierce and beautiful, and knows she deserves as good a shot as anyone else, if only she can get to the starting line. I can understand that. I’m from Bradford: a town in West Yorkshire best known for its large South Asian population, the birthplace of the singer Zayn Malik, many well-respected restaurants, and a certain brand of deprivation-induced delinquency. Now she wants to organise a school trip to Cambridge, but insists it’s not for the high fliers. “It would be for the students who tell me they let off fireworks in the park, or the students who tell me their dad was angry with them last night.” She wants to bring the students “who are always in detention or who just come to my room and linger instead of going out for break time … because they don’t know what Cambridge is”. There’s a certain sense of pride in her voice as she talks about them: The exercise I was involved in - a weekly seminar named Practical Criticism - revolved around analysing a text without considering its contexts: who wrote it, when did they write it, what socioeconomic factors could they have been responding to? When I was at Cambridge, I attended lectures and ran into supervisors who told me that the reason why the accent I had at the time didn’t pronounce its "Ts" was less to do with it being northern and more to do with it being working class.

I want the texts that are about Muslims to be just as rich and sharp, just as perceptive and loving, as the texts of the classical era; or the Victorian; or the medieval. I want them to be emotionally difficult and tangibly rewarding. Beyond interracial love stories, beyond headlines seeking to sensationalise the worst of us. Penguin has landed Good For Nothing , a “tender, witty and heartfelt” young adult debut novel from Mariam Ansar. Family restaurants boom with shoddily planned weddings and an extensive mithai collections. The barbers are perpetually busy, the Asian supermarket is manned by the wise and the vicious. Young people are dealt their silent struggles and go about their business under the watchful eye of their parents and the police.Mariam Ansar says: ‘This book is a love letter to every forgotten northern town, every young person of colour that has struggled to feel understood not simply in the depths of their misery – but also in the depths of their private joy. This one is for those whose smiles are sometimes read as troublesome, whose laughter is falsely labelled disruptive, whose silences are often misinterpreted. I hope it soothes. I hope it provokes anger. I hope it causes laughter upon laughter – and a secret tiny sob. My endless thanks goes to Sara and the team at Penguin Random House for their support with nurturing Good For Nothing, WriteNow for seeing something in its ugly baby stage, and of course, Claire Wilson, for helping me walk the story – slowly and carefully – to life.’ I’m not actively trying to teach anyone anything or trying to dispel a stereotype. I’m letting people be themselves. I work as a teacher in quite a deprived area. There’s a defiant “it is what it is” mentality here and I respect that. There’s this idea that we have to be palatable and soft and that we have to do all these things to be seen as exceptional. My three main characters are not the perfect representation of being Muslim or a person of colour. That was very intentional. Absolutely loved this book. I often wished when I was teaching in inner city Bradford 30 years ago that their were more books like this around. This is a true flavour of the diverse Yorkshire I love and I hope it makes its way onto the school curriculum. Contemporary texts can offer more scope, more depth, more richness: Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place For Us and Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons instantly come to mind. The literary starting point is obvious. It’s a relay which - I feel - begs to be continued.

Eman is the awkward girl whose favourite evenings are spent at home watching soaps with her Nani. Amir is the angry boy who won't talk about the brother he lost but won't let his name be forgotten either. Kemi is fast and fierce and beautiful, and knows she deserves as good a shot as anyone else, if only she can get to the starting line. They’re students, shopkeepers, taxi drivers, teachers, accountants, journalists, doctors, entrepreneurs… Who writes for them? The real people? Including the northern, brown-skinned, kasmey-yelling bros who act hard, and feel hard, but aren’t, underneath it all? A picture of West Yorkshire

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If you’ve never translated seriously, you don’t really understand what language is’: Pulitzer prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri Nor the mosque attendees of mine and my siblings’ youth, who drew unflattering images of our teachers and flashed them to the class with ease. Ansar added: “This book is a love letter to every forgotten northern town, every young person of colour that has struggled to feel understood not simply in the depths of their misery – but also in the depths of their private joy. This one is for those whose smiles are sometimes read as troublesome, whose laughter is falsely labelled disruptive, whose silences are often misinterpreted. I hope it soothes. I hope it provokes anger. I hope it causes laughter upon laughter – and a secret tiny sob.” I want all the children who make trouble in class to laugh.” She says if the novel feels authentic “it’s because I was thinking would the kids in my class like this? Would they find it funny? And if they wouldn’t laugh then I just wouldn’t write it.” Ansar hopes her pupils will connect with the book’s setting, too : “if they couldn’t say ‘I’ve been to that supermarket’, or walked in that park … it just wouldn’t work in the same way.” “My students are from deprived communities”, she says. “I want these characters to feel real, I think especially because they’re under-represented voices.” In part she feels responsible for widening pupils’ access to cultural capital, while not talking down to them. Her students know how much she loves Shakespeare (” Miss if you like him so much, why don’t you just marry him?“) but she emphasises her ability to code-switch, using the classroom to talk about everything from the celebrated bard to notorious bars. To the room, her love for teaching young people is obvious. To her students, she says “they should stop commenting on my TikToks”.