The Book of Bradford: New short story collection edited by The Khan author Saima Mir captures city's 'essence'

She just wishes that more people saw it that way. Hopefully, a new collection of short stories that Saima has edited, The Book of Bradford, will give readers a reason to connect with the area.

“It's such a great collection of short stories and I'm really excited for everybody to read them, people who don't know Bradford, to get a taste of what the city is like,” says Saima, 50, who was raised in the Heaton area but now lives in the Wandsworth part of London.

“As a writer, one of my great passions is to show people what the city is really like. It's so maligned and misunderstood. It's something I say quite a lot when I talk about Bradford - it's such a beautiful place, and one of the things that strikes me whenever I go there and go home is how stunning it is, both in terms of the landscape and in terms of the architecture, and I wish more people knew that.”

The collection, commissioned by Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, features stories by authors who are from, live in or have some form of connection to the city, including: The Yorkshire Post’s theatre contributor Nick Ahad, Marjorie ‘Malachi’ Whitaker, David Barnett, Sairish Hussain, Abda Khan, M.Y. Alam, Bill Broady, Becky Cherriman, Marcia Hutchinson, Lesley McEvoy and Ross Raisin.

“They are fictional accounts of things that happen in Bradford,” says Saima. “For example, Leslie McEvoy’s story is set in Bowling Hall and Nick Ahad’s story is set in the Sweet Centre in Lumb Lane” - an Asian dessert shop which goes back to 1964 - “so it's really diverse across the cross-section of what the city is like. And then Dave Barnett’s story is sort of like a tiny winy time travel story with (occultist) Aleister Crowley.

“The main idea of the book is to capture the essence of what the city of Bradford is like for that particular writer, but steep it in fiction.”

A launch event will take place at Loading Bay - a converted former warehouse in Duke Street - on Saturday from 1.30pm as part of the UK City of Culture 2025 programme, with appearances expected from Saima, Ross Raisin, Sairish Hussain and Nick Ahad.

After growing up in Heaton, Saima went to the University of Bradford to study biomedical sciences because, she says, “I was completely confused and I didn't know what I wanted”.

She went on to work for the city’s Telegraph & Argus newspaper, starting with pieces for the Voice of Youth columns.

"The minute I walked into that newsroom, I knew it was in my blood, it was what I wanted to do,” she says.

Saima later contributed to The Guardian and other national titles, and also worked for the BBC.

While the mother-of-three was pregnant with her first child, she wrote a novel, The Khan, which became a Times Bestseller, and followed up with its sequel Vengeance.

Now that she has departed for the capital, works like the short story anthology help to connect her to Bradford.

She says: “What was surprising to me was - despite the fact that the stories are so diverse and the writers are so diverse – how everything captured a bit of Bradford that I knew, that I understood, and it's like a homecoming.

“I'm sitting in my bed - I live in southwest London - at night reading this book, and it just took me back there. So that was really surprising: though we're all so different - men, women, different racial backgrounds and ethnicities - the fact that our love of the city and the way we experience it is so similar.”

Barnett was Saima’s former features editor at the Telegraph & Argus and she credits him with being one of the people who opened doors for her to be a journalist.

It was “lovely” to read his story, she says, although there was a strange coincidence that “the last time I had spoken about or heard about Aleister Crowley was when I was a student at St Joseph's College in Bradford”.

Meanwhile, in a sign of the recognition that Bradford 2025 is receiving, the BBC recently said that 22.6 million people have watched its content celebrating the city on TV and iPlayer between October 2024 and August this year.

Katrina Bunker, BBC Head of Yorkshire, said: “This year is bringing so many opportunities to celebrate Bradford and the richness of its stories.

“It’s wonderful to see the area and its people getting the representation they deserve across our platforms and products – and to know that lots of people are enjoying watching, reading and listening!”

The book launch at the weekend will also coincide with the BBC’s Contains Strong Language festival. The festival of poetry, performance and spoken word takes place in venues across the city from Thursday to Sunday this week, with many events free to attend. The ninth annual festival will feature many of BBC Radio 4’s best known programmes and presenters.

Testament, who is a poet, playwright, rapper and beatboxer based in West Yorkshire, will present the channel’s The AdVerb programme from the festival, with poetry and performance from Daljit Nagra, Kate Fox, Andrew McMillan and Bradford’s own Kirsty Taylor.

With all this literary celebration happening, it is a great moment to release The Book of Bradford.

Saima says: “If you have any connection with Bradford, you will feel like it's a hug in a book."

The Book of Bradford, edited by Saima Mir and published by Comma Press, is available in paperback from October 2. RRP: £10.99. www.commapress.co.uk/books/the-book-of-bradford