The best-selling author inspired by his childhood

As a child, he dreamed of leaving. Home was where the hurt was. Sathnam Sanghera couldn’t wait to leave.

He’d enjoyed a remarkable childhood, being born and bred in Wolverhampton.  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 Language and Literature.

Prior to becoming a writer he worked at a burger chain, a hospital laundry, a market research firm, a sewing factory and a literacy project in New York

Funny, then, that his mother is more proud of his  honorary degree of Doctor of Letters for services to journalism from The University of Wolverhampton than she is of his first from Cambridge.

Sathnam is equally joyful to be recognised by his home city. “Everyone wants to be recognised by their home town. My mum enjoys the Wolverhampton degree. When you accept your degree from Cambridge, you’re one of hundreds and you just kneel in front of some guy. But when you get your honorary degree from Wolverhampton, you do a speech.” Much better…

Sathnam is having a moment. Or, should we say, another moment. His current hardback book, Empireland, is a smash. Hitting number two on the Top Ten Sunday Times Bestseller List, it’s a poignant moment for a boy who couldn’t speak English when he started school.

While Sathnam’s self-worth isn’t invested in chart placings, he’s been thrilled to nudge ahead of Barack Obama in the charts. It is, frankly, a remarkable achievement. He’s been lauded by many, including Ben de Pear, the Editor of Channel 4 news, who’s called him the Nuno Espirito Santo of words. As analogies go, it’s awful – but you get the drift.

His story starts in Wolverhampton. Home. He hated it. Now he loves it; thinks of it every day, misses it.

“I think you have to reject the thing you grew up with to really love it. It was my mission in life as a young man to get out of Wolverhampton and end up in London and live a life in the media.” He achieved that goal. And then some.

Between 1998 and 2006 he was at The Financial Times, where he worked (variously) as a news reporter in the UK and the US, specialised in writing about the media industries, worked across the paper as Chief Feature Writer, and wrote an award-winning weekly business column.

Sathnam joined The Times as a columnist and feature writer in 2007 and is a regular on national radio and TV, having appeared on programmes including Have I Got News For You and BBC Front Row Late. and presented a range of documentaries.

Yet the higher he has climbed, the more he has missed his base camp. “The older I get the more and more fond I feel about Wolverhampton.

“Leaving it means you see it more clearly. I feel I can appreciate it in a deeper way than the people who didn’t leave. The best thing about the Black Country is its sense of humour. You won’t meet people who say it’s the best place on earth. That gives it a charm. You go to Yorkshire and you get all these people going on about how great it is, that’s it’s God’s own country. It’s the same with Wales, even though half the people from Wales no longer live there.

“People in Wolverhampton don’t do that. People are funny and nice. It’s real, isn’t it? Wolverhampton went through the experience of mass immigration decades before the rest of the country.

“When I think back on the Midlands I think about UB40; I think about that integration between black and brown and white.” He doesn’t gaze through rose-tinted shades, however. He grew up during the 1970s and 1980s, an era of overt racism in this region.

“There’s no doubt there was a lot of racial tension in the 70s and 80s. Wolverhampton Wanderers had a small number of fans who went around in a KKK group. The far right was rampaging through the city. I remember being with my mum on one occasion and having to hide in a temple from football fans. It’s all very different now. Because we had immigration before much of the rest of the UK, it feels very advanced, very sophisticated.”

His family didn’t have the money to send him to the city’s Grammar School. Though Sathnam had both the brains, the determination and the work ethic to make that happen. He was the only one from his family to achieve that and it changed his life. A good education provided him with his passport to the world. The libraries made him.

“None of my 54 cousins or siblings went to Grammar School but I did and it changed my life. It was that education that made me different to the rest of my family. It opened a world that wasn’t available to be before.”

At Grammar school, he was exposed to a world in which people listened to Radio 4 or sat down to dinner each evening around a table. It got him into writing. He had teachers who helped him to flourish. “That was the school that got me into writing. It was a particular time. it was a private school but a lot of us in the school were on assisted places. You had very rich people and very poor people. There was a meritocracy.”

He still keeps in touch with many of the Grammar school’s alumni, though his best friend, James, died in his 20s and Sathnam still misses him. Another very good friend, David, was from an entirely different background, Sathnam describes as ‘the posher end of the spectrum’. “I couldn’t believe his house when I went there. There was a reunion last year. I was struck by how many of my classmates went on to become doctors.”

From Wolverhampton, he went to Cambridge. The lofty spires and opportunity to study at one of the world’s greatest academic institutions marked another fork in the road. He was able to develop, to grow, to reach his potential.

He knew nothing about the college he chose, Christ’s, other than he imagined he’d be able to get a place with unspectacular A-Level grades. “That’s why I applied.” Then he found it was incredibly academic and the social life he imagined he’d have was almost non-existent.“The college prided itself on firsts,” he recalls. “It was an exam factory. Socially, it was a non-event, which I did slightly regret. I would maybe change that aspect.”

The work, however, was incredible. “It blew my mind. I did English, which was the perfect training. Because the social life was so poor, I put a lot of my energy into being an amateur journalist. I was freelancing for The Telegraph and The Sunday Business.”

Sathnam didn’t have high hopes. He wasn’t what you’d describe as ambitious. Though he wanted a life in the media, he didn’t think about landing books above former US Presidents in the charts. Not that he now minds.

“I was never particularly ambitious. Kids can only dream as far as their role models. In my case, I initially wanted to be a bank manager because I knew someone who was. Then I knew a guy who got a job on the FT, so I wanted to do that. The FT was right in the middle of the tech boom when I worked there. It was almost a commodity. It had money. It was really exciting. I travelled a lot and stayed in America more than a year. I had an expense account.” I could take people for lunch; imagine that, now.”

He worked successfully as a reporter though drifted away from news. It held no real interest. Sathnam was about the language – and also about making people laugh. So he drifted into features, as the best writers do, and became Young Journalist of the Year. “That was a long time ago,” he laughs, remembering his first year as a feature writer. The FT opened the doors to a world of opportunity. There were many people who’d talk to that title who wouldn’t talk to lesser publications. Sathnam remembers interviewing such characters as Matthew Freud of the head of Universal Music. He was giving rare access to a jet-set crowd.

And then came another turning point. Sathnam’s first book, The Boy With The Topknot: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton, was shortlisted for the 2008 Costa Biography Award, the 2009 PEN/Ackerley Prize and named 2009 Mind Book of the Year. It was adapted for TV and was BBC TWO’s highest-rated single drama of the year.

“I’d had quite a flashy job as chief feature writer on the FT,” he says. “I was interviewing all these cool people. But I felt increasingly empty. I was more interested in my own story than the stories of the people I was interviewing. My family wanted to marry me off and I discovered my father had schizophrenia and we didn’t know.” So he gave up his flash job and wrote a book that was published two years later. It provided a huge breakthrough. “You don’t see your family as people, you see them as a source of mild irritation or warmth,” he says.

“I’d not realised what my father had been through; my mum had kept me protected from some of the darkness. Writing my memoir was deeply emotional. I cried for many days.”

More than a decade after its publication, it continues to strike a chord with readers. It is profoundly moving. “It means a lot to me that people write a lot about it. They say they didn’t realise what their own father had been through, or, perhaps, that they are gay and don’t know how to talk to their family about it. I get emails like that regularly and It’s remarkable to have written a book that has changed people’s lives. I can die happy. I feel proud that my mother’s dark experience led to a positive experience for us.”

The success of The Boy With The Topknot changed other things. As a kid and a young man, Sathnam had wanted to run away from his life. He wanted to erase Wolverhampton, erase the awkwardness and insecurity he’d felt. When he exposed those feelings, however, he was greeted with an outpouring of empathy and warmth. He realised that he could be himself while also enjoying a career as a writer.

Other works, including the novel, Marriage Material, followed and he won numerous prizes. It was, however, his recent work, the remarkable Empireland, that proved brilliantly illuminating and became a slow-burning hit. As a product of Empire, he wanted to explore the way in which Britain is rooted in its imperial past.

The British Empire ran for centuries and covered vast swathes of the world. It is, as Sanghera reveals, fundamental to understanding Britain. However, even among those who celebrate the empire there seems to be a desire not to look at it too closely – not to include the subject in our school history books, not to emphasise it too much in our favourite museums.

Few books have captured the zeitgeist so well.“I didn’t think it would be a big deal. I can’t quite believe what has happened with it. Top Knot was incredible. I didn’t think I’d experience that again. But Empireland has gone way beyond that.”

In an era of culture wars, it’s also emboldened the racist thugs. – the idiots who subscribe to one of history’s worst ever ideas, that we can judge others based on a pigment in their skin. Sathnam has written movingly about the torrent of abuse he suffers daily. “I expected a certain amount of racist abuse but this has been more intense than I’ve expected. Until now you’ve had that story of Empire told by white men. Now you’ve got brown people doing it. That’s really triggering for a lot of racists.” When you’re talking about white people enslaving or conquering brown people it’s a hot potato. You expect abuse but this has been on another level and occasionally.” The racists have been so ruffled that now, if Sathnam writes about something utterly benign, like the weather, he gets trolled. “It’s targeted abuse and it’s not acceptable. Almost everyone of colour gets trolled. I’ve talked to a lot of people in the same position. We don’t put our phones on until after 12 noon.”

Yet for every racist there are 50 people disgusted by that abuse. Some contact the racists directly, offering to buy them a copy of Empireland; calling out their low-rent idiocy.

The lessons of Wolverhampton provide perspective. It’s the place of his birth, of family, of warmth and opportunity. “I get inspiration from my mother’s experience. She went through much worst stuff. She believed in something bigger; in her case religion, and family and children. So I don’t judge myself by the critics. I judge myself by what the people who I love think of me.”

It’s a remarkable philosophy from a writer who is gracious, generous and wise. We can be proud that he is of our own; that he has shone a bright light on the city that he – and we – call home.