Background
Sahota was born in 1981 in Derby, and his family moved to Chesterfield when he was seven years old.
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Sunjeev Sahota
Edit ProfileEducation
After finishing school, Sahota studied mathematics at Imperial College London. While he had studied English literature at GCSE level, the course did not require students to read a novel:.
Career
As of January 2011, he was working in marketing for the insurance company Aviva. Sahota had not read a novel until he was 18 years old, when he read Salman Rushdie"s Midnight"s Children while visiting relatives in India before starting university. He bought the book in the airport before flying to India.
We had to do a Shakespeare, and we did Macbeth.
We had to do a pre 20th-century text, and we did a play, She Stoops to Conquer. We had to do poetry and we did Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
But no novels. After Midnight"s Children, Sahota went on to read The God of Small Things, A Suitable Boy and The Remains of the Day.
In an interview in January 2011, he stated:
lieutenant was like I was making up for lost time – not that I had to catch up, but it was as though I couldn"t quite believe this world of storytelling I had found and I wanted to get as much of it down me as I possibly could. In 2013 he was included in a Granta list of 20 best young writers, released 20 years after the magazine first published such a list.
