SUMAYYA

I got married later and moved to London where I worked in law firms. Still deeply craving a creative life, I began writing a food memory blog about twelve years ago. That was the beginning of my writing career, and soon this took the form of a book proposal. Luck would have it that at the time I was working with Madhur Jaffrey on a TV show and she encouraged me to keep writing my first book on Pakistani cuisine and food memories. We soon became friends and she offered a quote for the first book. In 2016, Summers Under the Tamarind Tree was published by Frances Lincoln and I became the first published author on a Pakistani cookbook in Britain. One thing led to another and I soon quit law to take up writing full-time and began teaching cookery in some of Britain's most prestigious cook schools. I appeared in and wrote for BBC Good Food, Delicious, The New York Times, The Telegraph and also did a four week residency in The Guardian. My second book Mountain Berries & Desert Spice was published in 2017. By then I had moved to Scotland and had become a single mother.

I continued to write for many publications and also became a broadcaster and co-host on BBC Scotand's Kitchen Cafe for a year and I'm currently a panellist on BBC Radio 4's The Kitchen Cabinet with Jay Rayner. I'm well-connected in the food writing world and have been on the committee of the Guild of Food Writers for the past four years and have been a member for ten years

I've finished work on my third book, a food memoir called - a narrative coming of age story about growing up around food, first on ship and later as a young woman in the kitchen navigating my way around Pakistani conventional society. I write about how sensory intuitive cooking is the way I learned to cook without recipes, by merely trusting my senses - very much like how I navigate life. This book won the Scottish Book Trust Next Chapter Award 2021 for a book in progress and is to be published in April 2023 by Murdock Books.

My writing journey couldn't have been possible without my strong desire to nurture my mindset and self-belief. I've always trusted my intuition and worked hard on constantly evolving and learning. I now mentor other food and life writers through my mentoring programs called Nurtured and Nourished as well as support other writers find their authentic voice, in my online monthly membership Savoured. My online course Brewed, a 4 week course to craft a cookbook / nonfiction book proposal mingled with helping support creative confidence launches in October. I also host my own podcast, A Savoured Life, fortnightly.

In further education, I'm excited to be reading my Master in Creative Writing at University of Glasgow in 2023. I'm also currently researching my next book which is a braided narrative of folklore, food and history from an ancient city in my homeland.