Monica Ali: a brief biography

Monica Ali was born in 1967 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her father was a teacher; her mother a counselor.
In 1971, when Ali was three, her family moved to Bolton, England, where she was enrolled in school.
Ali’s father adored R.K. Narayan and she devoured him as a child. She also read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; Flaubert and Zola; Austin and Hardy. Ali acknowledges these writers had all made a deep impression on her and perhaps even influenced her own work.
Ali did not begin writing until much later. She attended Oxford, where she studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. After college, she briefly worked in marketing.
Ali began writing only after she had her first child. Once she became a mother, Ali says she remembered the stories her father had told her as a child and felt a duty to preserve them, if only for her own children.
So Ali joined a short story forum on the internet, where writers anonymously exchanged work and shared feedback. This sharpened Ali’s critical skills and allowed her to discover her own voice. She immediately recognized the short story form was too confining and wanted to write a novel. This would later become Brick Lane