Bali Rai
About Author
Bali Rai was born in 1971 and raised as a working class Punjabi in Leicester. He grew up in a deprived area of Leicester, a city which is almost unique in terms of cultural mix, and his style of writing is firmly grounded in the reality that he has seen around him since he was a child. The senior school he attended was about 80% ethnic - 20% white children in terms of ethnic mix.
Bali Rai has been writing short stories and poetry since the age of eight. As a child he made up wild and exciting stories and his imagination has been vivid ever since. At school he excelled at English language and told his teachers that he would one day be a writer.
He left school with eight GCSEs and English was always his favourite subject. After school he did three a-levels at a local sixth form - none of which was English Literature, which he now regrets. He went on to graduate from Southbank University in London with a 2:1 in politics and since then he has had various jobs in retail, cinema, and telesales and has kept a keen, almost obsessive, interest in current affairs.
Many of his peers are not involved in 'mainstream' occupations, and never treated education as a viable option. Bali Rai is the first graduate of his family and writing is an attempt to get the people around him to read books, as most of his friends think literature says nothing to them about their lives. Bali Rai is writing for them; speaking to them in their own language about situations they can identify with. For Bali, the greatest thing about being a writer is for a young reader to say 'your book made me want to read more books'.
Bali Rai writes stories inspired by his working class Punjabi/Sikh background, but his aim was always that his writing should be enjoyed by readers everywhere, irrespective of class or culture. It is pleasing to see that Balis school and library visits happily bear out his vision of a universal appeal. From top public schools to tough inner city Academies where Bali has become a regular across the country, the appeal of Balis writing appears unconnected to any racial or socio-economic grouping. He is invited to predominantly white schools where teachers wish him to introduce a British Asian experience, as well as to mixed schools and British Asian schools. Organisers at inner city schools are amazed by the response from students to his author sessions and unique creative writing workshops.
Balis ability to tackle the harsh realities of growing up in the UK and blend this with humour and often a overriding optimism have resulted in his books being devoured by the real readers out there and passed on to friends to enjoy.
All of Balis teen titles have been short-listed for awards across the UK, including twice making the Booktrust Teenage Prize Shortlist. Three of Balis novels appear in The Ultimate Teenage Book Guide and he is now a Princes Trust ambassador.
(Un)arranged marriage, Bali's debut novel, won The Stockport Childrens Book Award, The Angus Childrens Book Award and The Leicester Childrens Book Award as was short listed for The North East Book Award, The Wirral Paperback Award, The South Lanarkshire Book Award as well as The Branford Boase Award for debut novels. It received blanket national and local press and media coverage since its publication in May 2001.
The Crew was published in March 2003 to great acclaim and won the Leicester Book Award:
"Written in a streetwise dialect, this is a jewel of a bookThe publisher's warning 'Not for younger readers', should ensure the large sales it deserves" The Independent
Rani & Sukh, published in May 2004, is a gripping tale that crosses the generations with a tale of forbidden love that will strike a chord with all teenagers wishing to choose their partner in life free of family restrictions. It was shortlisted for the BookTrust Teenage Prize 2004, the North East Childrens Book Award 2004 and the Berkshire Book Award 2005. It won the Redbridge Teenage Book Award and the Renfrewshire Teenage Book Award 2005.
The Whisper was published in May 2005 to much acclaim and was shortlisted for the BookTrust Teenage Prize 2005. We revisit the Crew (Billy, Ellie, Jas, Willy and Della) in dangerous times: the police are pulling drug dealers off the streets of the Ghetto and people are starting to say that the Crew are involved. Will they be able to solve the mystery and stop the Whisper?
The Last Taboo, published 2006, is a hard-hitting novel about two teenagers facing up to the consequences of racial prejudice between asian and black communities, from award-winning author Bali Rai.
"A powerful depiction of family history, cultural prejudice and gang culture...hard-hitting." The Bookseller
The Angel Collector was published in June 2007 and is a dark, edge-of-your-seat thriller about Sophie, a girl who goes missing at a music festival. The story follows her best friend Jit's frantic search for her, which leads him to a racist cult in Scotland where a horrific truth comes to light.
Soccer Squad is Bali's football series, with plenty of football action, pacey story and fun perfect to hook boys in to reading!
City of Ghosts was published in July 2009. It is an epic tale of love, war and rebellion. Can the ghosts of the past change the future of the citizens of Amritsar . . . ?
Author link
Interview
FIRE CITY
CORGI
SEPTEMBER 2012
Bali Rai, who is known for his gritty, urban books for young adults, has turned to fantasy in his latest novel, Fire City.
The novel takes place 25 years after a great war changed the world forever, leaving demons in charge of the planet and a dwindling human race. A small band of human rebels in Fire City fight for their freedom but it is a losing battle, until the arrival of Jonah who seems to have powers greater than those of the demons....
While Bali Rai's shift to fantasy writing might come as a surprise to his fans, the author says the transition is a natural one for him. "I remember trying to write my own version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when I was ten or 11 years old," he says. "But when I started wanting to write about things that have not been written about, like forced marriage, I became known for writing that kind of book and you can get pigeon-holed as a writer."
It was working with a Year 7 creative writing class on a story dubbed 'Planet of the Chickens' that Rai decided it was time to write something a little different. His starting point for Fire City, the novel's setting, was the 'real world', he says. "It's like taking a photo of your own city, in this case Leicester, and filtering through a Gotham City lens and throwing in bits of Wild West films, then adding some demons with green eyes."
Despite the fantastical setting of the novel, Rai uses it to confronts some very human issues, beginning with politics and capitalism. "If you were a crazed, immoral free market capitalist, your ideal would be a few very rich people with everyone else very poor and there to keep you rich," he explains. "So I have based Fire City on this model with the world divided between the 'wanted' and the 'unwanted'." Fire City is home to those 'unwanted' who work in factories producing goods that will keep the 'wanted' in luxury.
He adds, "Fire City is where rampant free market capitalism will take us. In a free market the people who are mega-rich will always come out on top and in my view, that's dangerous. Compare someone like Abramovich with a kid working on a dump (like Andy Mulligan's novel, Trash), they are both human beings but their lives will never touch. You can talk about issues like this in a fantasy novel without it becoming a political rant."
Creating the demons was easier and more fun, he adds. "I like the evil ones best, especially Valefor who is the leader in this region. He's an interesting character and I started by visualising him as a kind of 'Man with No Name' but in Manga with bells and whistles on. He's reptilian but has a jaw like a donkey and the image of his huge wings wrapped around a servant girl, devouring her, was the starting point."
Rai had to work hard to create the complex structure of the society through the story rather than through explanations. "I had to work quite closely with my editor to achieve this and did so through the adding the detail of the story." Dialogue is also used to explain the setting and drive the plot. "I want everyone to be able to read and enjoy my books and dialogue could help more reluctant Year 9 readers to access the story.
"Also I'm inspired by film and television, they are a big influence on me, and I want to get my dialogue right. It is a challenge when youre writing about teenagers and youre an adult, but I enjoy doing it."
While Fire City works as a stand-alone book, Rai has left an opening for a sequel. "I would like to write a follow-up and I am in the planning stages of that at the moment. I actually conceived it as a trilogy, with the 'Star Wars' pattern - in the first book, good and evil meet and crash and the dilemma is overcome, in the second evil seems to have won and good gets battered, and in the third, good wins out at the end. This story ark works across a number of trilogies."
However, the next book we will see published from Bali Rai is called Tales from Devana High, funny and gritty urban stories for slightly younger readers from ten to teenage. "As a reader I enjoy reading crime novels but I always read across different genres and that influences what I want to write. My next novel will be about a killer virus and a race against time."
He plans to continue to write for young people. "Young people are still developing as individuals and they are always interesting for me because of that. Teens are very open but at the same time they are still formulating their opinions about themselves and their identity and when youre writing about teen characters, this makes it more interesting to write and read about," he explains.
"You can explore so much through a teen character. When you're 14 or 15 and you fall in love you think you're the only one who has ever been that much in love, ever. I remember falling out with my first girlfriend and for three days I thought the world was going to end and then I started hanging out with my mates again and playing football and just moved on. But as well as all the drama, teens can be really funny and you can explore all of that."
Rai works with a number of teenage groups researching their views on reading. These discussions have lead him to conclude that there is a "massive disconnect" between what teenagers themselves want to read, which is a "huge diverse range of everything, urban reality, historical fiction, romance, thrillers etc" and what they are offered due to the nervousness of teachers and parents, librarians and publishers themselves.
"As adults we want to make our own choices about what we read and to form our own opinions of what we read but we are not letting young people do that for themselves. There are too many gatekeepers between them and the books they want to read, and young people don't like that." He adds, "One young woman in a panel told the adults, "I don't tell you what to read so why tell me what I should be reading?".
Without the books they are looking for, teenagers will simply drift on to adult books. "Thats a pity given how much great young adult fiction is available for them," says Rai, adding, "Adults probably need to be more realistic. Within two or three clicks people can read whatever they want online."
Rai's writing tips for young people are as follows: read as much as you can across all genres ("The first thing I ask young people who tell me they want to write is, what are you reading?"), and "sit down and do it". "It sounds really basic but if you really thing about those two points, they are the basis of being a good writer. Don't sit and think, do it. If you write 1,000 words a day, you will develop as a writer."
June 2011
KILLING HONOUR
Corgi
In Killing Honour, Bali Rai explores the issue of 'honour killings' in a community in Leicestershire. When Sat's sister Jas is married off into the Atwal family, she becomes quiet and distant and then disappears. The Atwals say she has run off with another man but Sat is convinced that something more sinister has caused her disappearance.
Author Bali Rai talks to ReadingZone about his latest novel:
Q: Why did you want to write about so-called 'honour killings'?
A: I suppose it was sparked by things I have heard about in my own family. I have a male cousin who arrived from India in the mid 80's and in order to stay in the country, he had to marry a British person.
He met a young British Asian girl from Leicester whom he married. He was about 22, she was just 17, and he used to beat her quite badly. I was 14 or 15 and I had no idea what was going on and shortly after my sisters wedding, the girl hung herself in front of her four year old daughter.
A few years later my aunt told me that he was violent towards her and that there had been lots of domestic abuse and it made me angry that members of my family had known what was going on and that everyone turned a blind eye.
I know five or six young women and one man who suffered from 'honour'-based violence. This issue crosses cultural and religious boundaries. My background is as a British Punjabi Sikh. What this book does is draws a line back to Unarranged Marriage and concepts of honour and hypocrisy.
Six or seven hundred yards from here is a house where a woman was half burned to death by her husband because she wanted a job. Lots of older mothers and grandmothers new about it but one said anything about it. It's important to talk about these things as a British community. It's so important for men to stand up and start debating it as well, generally it's an issue of men abusing women and it's men who can stop this happening.
Q: The novel is very hard-hitting; which part did you find the hardest to write?
A: The hardest part was writing from a female point of view, especially the part where Jas is going to be married and is being told that her body is now her husband's property and she has no life of her own. I found it difficult to get it into my head, and hard to get out of it; I felt like I was there and writing it from her point of view, and it wasn't a comfortable place to be.
Q: You explore the role of the police in this issue in Killing Honour. Is there a sense that they should be more proactive?
A: What I wanted to show was that there are quite a lot of cases of this kind of abuse and according to the statistics, it's actually getting worse. Last year alone there were 17,000 incidences of honour-based violence.
In one case that was reported, a brother fought for five or six years to uncover the truth and said at the time, all the police had to do was to check the passport of the mother-in-law to find out what had happened, and they hadn't.
Today, this is not necessarily because the police don't care but the police is an institution and in certain communities, across Sikh, Muslim, Hindu cultures, it's culturally insensitive for police to go into houses and question people. There is some progress on this issue now but there is a hidden British Asian community which is not moving forward.
Q: The story is told largely through Sat's conversations with a journalist. Do you feel the media has a role to play in highlighting these cases?
A: I remember when I read the case about the brother searching for his missing sister that the brother said that if not been for the local MP and a newspaper and journalist, then this case would never have got off the ground.
Journalists get such a bad press and I'm annoyed that people do this because readers are the ones who want to follow celebrities, rather than using newspapers to explore issues like this.
I also wanted something positive in the story. I didn't know if it would work in terms of structure but the more I wrote, the more I felt it did work. The action moves very quickly when you're with Sat so you get that excitement in the story but when he's with Amanda, the journalist, you can step back and the reader can catch their breath.
Q: The novel is also controversial because of its setting, including drug-dealing and prostitution.
A: The characters Taz and Ricky exist in terms of the dubious roles they play in society. There is a sub-culture in Leicester and alongside normal, everyday businesses are illegal businesses that have a large sprinkling of British Asians who have taken them over and brought in drugs and prostitution just as in every community you have some people doing good stuff and some people who are not.
This is about real people and real people indulge in these activities, people will do what they do and I have no problem with depicting that. I'm not trying to corrupt people with drug references etc, I find it bonkers that it's even an issue now when young people can click a mouse and look at whatever they want online.
If you're going to write realistic stories, you need to face that reality and write about it. I also wanted to write the kinds of books that me and my mates wanted to read, the kind that weren't around then, or were but we weren't allowed to read them.
I would imagine the book could be banned from some shelves but on the whole my books don't get banned by teachers and librarians who understand young people and how fiction has developed over the last few years, just as you wouldn't ban books like Dog in the Night time or Doing It by Melvin Burgess.
People will either like or not like it but the reviews on the whole have been positive. If people understand why it's written the way it is, they will support it, but if people read it out of context, there will be problems.
If it gets people talking and young men thinking about domestic abuse, that is as much as I can achieve. To bring it out into the open. I read a part of the story of it to Year 9's and they loved it. All I want is to get people thinking about it. Or to think about the issue of forced marriages. That's a separate issue but debate is important.
Q What are you writing now?
A: I'm writing the next book now, it's completely different and not something that people will expect. It's a sort of dystopian novel, a kind of cowboy story with a manga comic feel to it, with zombies and demons thrown in. I love manga and comic novels. This is a classic Western story but with a modern, urban edge.
I could easily have written another gritty urban 'Bali Rai' novel but I have done quite a few and when I was younger I wrote other kinds of books with my friends and some quite sci fi stuff, horror, and I used my imagination more.
I also want to do a sequel to City of Ghosts. I'm trying to pick up the pace of my writing. City of Ghosts took 18 months to write and six months research, Killing Honour took four months. The new one I hope won't take more than three months.
I still do a number of school visits, too. They are a lot of fun. I like trying to enthuse 500 year 9s and 10s about books, I want every young person to enjoy reading and on the whole, I get a good reaction when I go into schools.
July 2009
CITY OF GHOSTS
(Doubleday)
Bali Rai's City of Ghosts is a fictional account of the events that led to the Amritsar Massacre in the Punjab in 1919. Based on historical fact, it provides an authentic glimpse of the British Raj in India at the turn of the C20th century.
City of Ghosts is a powerfully evocative story about India and the Punjab in the early 20th century, on the cusp of revolt against the British Raj. The novel, which is aimed at older, mature readers, explores the events that led to the massacre of unarmed civilians at Amritsar in 1919, a tragedy that helped to galvanise the Indian independence movement.
Bali Rai, a British Asian, wrote City of Ghosts because he wanted to explore this part of his countrys history. If you are Punjabi, you grow up hearing the stories about Amritsar but I felt I didnt really know what had happened then and I wanted to research it, he explains.
Rai originally intended to base his story on the character of Udham Singh, who became a hero in India following his assassination of Sir Michael ODwyer, considered by many to be responsible for the Amritsar Massacre. It is hard to explain why Dyer did what he did and even those who knew him well dont seem to have understood his actions, said Rai. I decided to explore the events that led to the massacre as I didnt feel I had got to the bottom of what had happened and why.
The massacre took place during Baisakhi, the Sikh religious new year. Following an earlier protest, martial law had been declared in Amritsar and public gatherings were not allowed. However, people from other regions were already arriving in the city to celebrate the festival so a gathering was inevitable. When a crowd collected in the Jallianwala Bagh, near the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the soldiers began to fire without warning, killing hundreds of men, women and children.
Having spent months researching the history of the massacre, Rai says he put his notes to one side and let the characters tell the story. Many of the details in City of Ghosts are historically accurate, however, and real characters are fictionalised. I wanted the right people to be in the right place at the right time but I also wanted to create a story using them.
Three main characters emerge to tell their stories: a soldier, and two teenage boys, one who joins revolutionary gang and another who is in love. Their paths separate and cross as the events unfold. This is not about exploring colonial politics but finding what motivated these individuals, says Rai.
The soldier, Bissen, recently returned from the front line in Europe where he fell in love with an English nurse, dreams of returning to Britain. His flashbacks to the front line give a glimpse of what it might have been like for Indian soldiers fighting a trench war under wet European skies.
The teenage boys, both orphaned, have their own passions and concerns. Jeevan joins a revolutionary group in the mistaken hope that they will provide him with a new family. His friend Gurdial is in love with a merchants daughter, Sohni, but has little hope that her father will allow him to marry her.
As their stories are told, a supernatural element emerges in the shape of Sohnis murdered mother, who arrives as a ghost and tries to help guide the characters. I was told so many stories of ghosts and spirits as I grew up, I wanted to introduce that sense of magic, says Rai. This sense of the supernatural and the events leading up to the massacre also reflect a strong sense of fatalism which is evident in Punjabi society, says Rai.
It is the minutiae of the characters day to day activities that bring this world to life the heat, the sounds and smells of the city and their homes, how they pass the time and the ominous sense of inevitability that gives the novel its pace.
This is a complex story and a violent one, for which Rai is unapologetic. I want it to be honest, and honest about what happened. I think readers would be able to accept the context and that what happens in a WW1 battle and during the massacre is going to be violent, he explains
I think that this part of history is often ignored or just touched on without really explaining what happened, he adds. I wanted to help young people to put the Amritsar Massacre into context and to understand what happened, and why it happened, from many different perspectives. I hope that the book will help remind readers that historical events impact on ordinary, real lives.
Rai is also considering writing a sequel to the story, based on events that took place during the Partition of India.
Bali Rai has written a number of books for teenagers including (Un)arranged Marriage and Rani and Sukh. He also writes for younger children and his football series, Soccer Squad, is based on an under-elevens football team set up by a local youth club.
