Sharon Duggal writes novels and short stories. Her second novel, Should We Fall Behind (2020, Bluemoose Books) was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s 2021 Encore Award, selected for Between the Covers, BBC television’s flagship book show and chosen as a Prima Magazine Book of the Year. Her debut, The Handsworth Times was The Morning Star’s Fiction Book of the Year 2016 and selected as the Brighton City Reads Big Read in 2017. Her short fiction appears in anthologies on and offline including The Book of Birmingham, Visual Verse, and Love Bites: Fiction Inspired by Pete Shelley and Buzzcocks. Sharon has recently completed her third novel and is now planning a fourth.
Sharon has an MPhil in Creative Writing (University of Sussex) and teaches workshops and courses for organisations including the Arvon Foundation, West Dean College, New Writing South, New Writing North, Spread the Word and others. She is a current Royal Literary Fund (RLF) Fellow at the University of Brighton.
Alongside writing, Sharon is also one half of the Ruben and Sharon Show, the UK’s only regular radio show with a mum and son presenter team, playing out on Radio Reverb, where she now also sits on the board as an Associate Director.
Sharon grew up in inner-city Birmingham as part of a large Indian family; her background inspires and informs her writing.
____________________________________________
On Sharon Duggal’s writing:
Should We Fall Behind:
Catherine Taylor, The Guardian: At its heart the novel is a spacious, melancholy work, its sorrowful yet hopeful storylines an elegy to time’s passing.
David Collard, The TLS: Sharon Duggal affirms that there is such a thing as society, in which there are communities with shared values and interests. She does so with passion and integrity but without tub-thumping, and her generous, humane novel is all the stronger for it.
Preti Taneja, award-winning author: Duggal writes about the devestation of vulnerable lives with all the hard-eyed clarity of William Trevor, and as much literary heart as Rohinton Mistry- SHOULD WE FALL BEHIND deeply inhabits its world but wears its craft so lightly – it is beautifully observed, suffused with inner-city melancholy and shot through with hope that can only come from random encounters, the small acts of generosity that help strangers to find affinity with each other even in the worst of times.
Dzifa Benson, Wasifari Magazine: Duggal’s observational and forensic skills in developing her characters are such that her story never devolves into proselytising. Instead, Duggal’s writing sincerely, sensitively, and unaffectedly navigates secret sorrows, disappointments, regrets, and failures in unflinching detail, revealing what has led each character to where they are: trying not to crack under the strain of such hard-knock lives. It makes for a generous and deeply affecting novel.
Nina Pottell, Prima Magazine: A gloriously astute and tender story.
The Morning Star: The concluding chapters are impeccably paced and, as befits a writer of Duggal’s calibre and sensitivity.
The Handsworth Times:
Paul Simon, The Morning Star: The Handsworth Times, utterly of a specific place and time but also universal in its themes, is a prose act of praise to the humanist spirit that will never succumb to fear and hatred. It is quite simply the most accomplished, complete and startlingly authentic novel I have read this year.
Zaheer Kazmi, 3:AM Magazine: Duggal captures the ambient world of Birmingham’s multicultural inner-city at a moment in time. The uneasy relations between local communities and authorities, the endless grey factoryscapes, the worker-management stand-offs, the casual violence, the fantasies of escape. From the industrial wastelands of Birmingham to the haunted memory of village life in Punjab, her book is, in turns, affecting and desolate.
Robb Johnson: The Handsworth Times is an outstanding work in every aspect. It conveys a visceral sense both of time & place with a prose style that manages to be both clear & detailed, & also stylish & unostentatiously poetic. But for all its literary qualities, the book is also gifted with fiction’s first requirements, a rattling good yarn & an engaging cast of characters, & these are again managed with consummate & effortless skill.
