Monica Ali is an award-winning, best-selling writer. She is most renowned for her breakthrough novel Brick Lane, which brought attention to the Bangladeshi immigrant experience in London.
Ali is the daughter of English and Bangladeshi parents and was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 1967. In 1971, aged three, Ali’s family moved to Bolton, England, in order to escape the civil war that erupted in Pakistan. After attending the Bolton School, she studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford University and graduated from Wadham College. She then entered the field of publishing, working in the marketing department of a small publishing house before moving into sales and marketing management positions at the publishing house Verso. Ali married a consultant, Simon Torrance, and gave birth to her first child in 1999. She subsequently begun to experiment with writing fiction, but soon found that short stories did not suit her. After giving birth to her second child in 2001, Ali’s father died. His death prompted her to begin work on her first novel, “Brick Lane”. It was published in 2003 to critical acclaim and was adapted into a film released in 2007. Ali now lives in London with her family.
