Born in Derby, UK, Sunjeev Sahota has published four novels: Ours Are the Streets; The Year of the Runaways; China Room; and The Spoiled Heart. Sahota’s paternal grandparents emigrated from Punjab to the UK in 1966, and his family moved from Derby to Chesterfield in the late 1980s. He studied mathematics at Imperial College London and later worked for an insurance company. Sahota has stated that he did not read a novel until 18, when he picked up Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children at an airport. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day quickly followed, after which Sahota is said to have read about four novels a week while completing his undergraduate degree (“Interview” n.p.).