Telling Tales

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Telling Tales: Nikesh Shukla

Nikesh Shukla

BBC Radio 4 Extra - Telling Tales, Nikesh Shukla

We delve into language, boxing and multi-cultural representation, with Nikesh Shukla.

Talking about language, boxing, role models, multi-cultural representation and more, with the writer Nikesh Shukla.

This week, we talk about language, boxing, role models, multi-cultural representation and more, with the writer Nikesh Shukla.

Nikesh remembers the publication of his first short story and the joy of seeing his name printed alongside people he respected, in a book, with a bar code on the back. This achievement prompted Nikesh to focus on writing, instead of a “mediocre” rapping career. Although some of his earliest lyrics do feature in his debut novel, Coconut Unlimited, which was shortlisted for the Costa Award in 2010.

This novel features the adventures of three hip hop-obsessed school boys, growing up in Harrow in the 1990s. Nikesh was initially told by literary agents and publishers that there wasn’t a market for Coconut Unlimited. More preposterously, one agent said that he didn’t find the characters “authentically Asian”.

Nikesh proved that, not only was there a market for his novel, but there was also an appetite for The Good Immigrant, a crowd-funded showcase for writers of colour. This 2016 anthology took just three days to fund and was so successful that it’s been succeeded by an American edition, a journal, and a literary agency to prioritise writers from marginalised backgrounds.

Nikesh believes in a multi-cultural Britain and he wants to have big conversations about what that looks like. It can’t just be the elite that tell our stories. They’ve been telling stories for centuries and books can change the course of who you are.

We hear Namaste, Nikesh’s meditation on language and identity which is addressed to his baby daughter, and was recorded for BBC Radio 4 when The Good Immigrant was published.

We also hear Nikesh interview Dr Deborah Jump about boxing for the Radio 4 series One To One. His interest in boxing was precipitated by a racist incident on a late night train in 2016. The impact of racially-motivated violence, the influence of role models and upbringing, and the debate about boxing, are all explored in his latest book, The Boxer, a work of YA fiction that Nikesh wrote in just three months and was published earlier this year.

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