Bringing Manchester’s Curry Mile to vibrant life, the #Merky prize-winning author’s cross-genre work focuses on the lives and language of young British men. He discusses identity and inspiration
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n a stretch of Manchester road known for kebabs, shisha smoke and restless energy, three young men drive towards a night that already feels like it’s slipping out of control. The premise of Wimmy Road Boyz, the debut novel by #Merky books new writers’ prize winner Sufiyaan Salam, is deceptively simple: “three boyz drive and dream of an impossible night on an endless street”. What follows is anything but.
Salam’s novel unfolds over a single evening on the Curry Mile, that dense artery of Rusholme nightlife, where a white BMW carries Immy, Khan and Haris through a series of skirmishes, side quests and emotional unravellings. It’s a book about masculinity, violence and love, but also about language – how young British men speak, perform and fail to articulate what’s really going on inside their heads.
At 28, Salam is a standard-bearer for a new generation of literary novelists. He grew up in Blackburn, a town he felt at the time was “a where dreams go to die sort of situation”, shaped by racial tensions and deep deprivation. “It’s a very racially segregated place, and the ward I grew up in had one of the highest levels of child poverty in the country,” he says. Being brown and Muslim in post-9/11 Britain, he recalls a vague but persistent sense of otherness and fear. As a teenager, he wore a backpack with flowers on it, hoping it would make him seem less threatening. But his home town also gave him “this real mosaic of human life”, a range of experiences that now feed directly into his fiction.
