He has received a literary award from Stormzy, been nominated for a Bafta, and made a video for Sir Elton John. Now, Sufiyaan Salam has written one of the year’s most hotly tipped debut novels, set over an epic night out in Manchester.
It’s the morning after the night before on Manchester’s famous Curry Mile.
Most of the eating establishments that line this stretch of road are hidden behind metal shutters, and a trickle of people and cars pass through.
It was a very different scene the previous night, when the restaurants and road were packed with revellers celebrating Eid.
“When I was here last night, and it was Eid, the whole thing was just blocked with cars. People were queuing up so they can just drive around again, and then they’ll stop at the other end and come back.
“Last night, and most nights, you have people spilling out onto the streets.
“There were two kids sitting on top of a car with vuvuzelas, just making as much noise as possible. It was fun.”
On nights like those, the Curry Mile is transformed into a “mythical” place, Salam says.
“For me, when I was a kid, and coming here as a teenager with the boys, and when I come here as an adult, there’s this feeling that it’s not quite a reality,” he explains. “You’ve slipped into this… It’s like a religious pilgrimage in a way. That’s what’s interesting.”
That’s the heady, heightened atmosphere that the author has tried to capture in his novel Wimmy Road Boyz.
Toby MerrittThe book follows three British-Pakistani friends in their early twenties over a chaotic night on Wilmslow Road, of which the Curry Mile is a part.
In 2024, the book won the New Writers’ Prize from Stormzy’s #Merky Books. Merky called it a “blistering debut novel”, and Stormzy declared that he “loved it”.
It also earned 28-year-old Salam a place on the Observer’s list of the best debut novelists of 2026, with the paper saying “his raucous, wildly inventive prose is bound for a much bigger audience”.
The book was partly inspired by a night out the author had with two male friends after lockdown, he explains, speaking in one of the few Curry Mile cafes that are open on this March morning.
Salam was going through “tough personal life stuff” at the time, but didn’t feel he could bring it up because it “would just bring the mood down”.
“So we never discussed it and we just had, on the surface level, a very fun night,” he says.
“Our night ended and there was no drama and it was cool. But these things can go sour. You can have a ticking time bomb with that.”
‘Rollercoaster’
Indeed, in the book, the “tough personal life stuff” his three characters are dealing with does ignite as the evening goes on.
And as the friends travel up and down the road, and in and out of its bars and restaurants, they also move through a minefield of pressures and politics – of race, class, sex, age, economy – and attempt to navigate the precarious, prickly state of the modern world.
Their anxieties don’t weigh the book down, though – the characters’ coping strategy is to process them with a heavy dose of flippant humour, or switch focus to the night’s more immediate desires and dramas.
That “rollercoaster” between fun and stress “feels very like life”, Salam says.
“I’m really resistant to the idea of writing a trauma novel. I want something that is fun and entertaining.”
Salam’s vivid and inventive style makes it a highly enjoyable ride.
The author wanted to avoid stereotypes about young men – especially young Muslim men – and saw no reason to compromise his style or his grand ambitions to write about and for them, he says.
“The writing hasn’t been dumbed down. It isn’t talking down to anyone.
“I’ve just written something that I believe is trying to be as good as it can be, and I’m trying to canonise or write about a very British experience, a very masculine British experience.
“I think that experience should be given the same weight as the experience Irvine Welsh writes about in Trainspotting, or James Joyce’s work, or Dickens, or that kind of thing. I don’t see the point of not aiming for something that is on that level.”
Salam’s writing is both colloquial and kaleidoscopic, and the combination of high literary aspirations and streetwise storytelling can be traced back to his upbringing.
He grew up in Blackburn surrounded by “a lot of gang culture” and a soundtrack of Tupac Shakur, he says, while also frequenting the town’s library with his parents and being made to write essays about classic literature by his granddad.
Later, he started reading Joyce’s Ulysses on the same day that he went to watch a Pakistani rapper, and was inspired to try to fuse the two by giving the informal wordplay of his diverse youth culture “the same kind of respect or care as the best literature”.
“I was interested in finding, what’s the actual language of my and these boys’ inner monologues, that’s going to be very slang-heavy and will also have peppered in there Pakistani Urdu and some Arabic words?
“And also they can discuss Aristotle. They’re not idiots. It’s not this surface-level stereotypical version.”
Getty ImagesThis is Salam’s first published book, but he wrote two novels as a teenager, which he circulated to friends.
He would also make DIY films. “I was constantly just making stuff as a kid. I had Doctor Who action figures, and I would make my own film ideas with him.”
His ideas grew more ambitious, but he didn’t have the equipment, money or manpower to film them – so taught himself animation using YouTube tutorials.
“That was an affordable way I could make crazy things like an alien and a spaceship. I wasn’t thinking about a career – animation was just something I wanted to do for fun.”
However, after he made a music video for a friend, then won a competition, he found himself in demand to make animated lyric videos for the likes of James Blunt and Sir Elton John.
He juggled that with studying English, doing a screenwriting master’s, then working as an intern storyliner on Channel 4 soap Hollyoaks.
“I was doing that and then I was doing the animation in the evening, because I wasn’t going to turn down Elton John.”
After the internship, he became a script editor on pre-school animation JoJo & Gran Gran – while also working on his own writing projects for both the page and screen.
He co-wrote a short film called Magid/Zafar, a tale of forbidden love set in a busy Pakistani takeaway (inspired by one on the Curry Mile, of course).
That won best British short at the British Independent Film Awards last November and was nominated for the same prize at the Baftas.
“I like flowing between mediums,” Salam says casually.
Back outside on the Curry Mile, he points out some food outlets that feature in his novel.
“There’s a bunch of sweet centres on this side. I walked past yesterday and they’d built a palace out of the Asian sweets, which just looked incredible. I wish I’d seen that as I was writing the book so I could have put it in.
“Maybe I’ll get to make a film of it, and I’ll put it in.”
Wimmy Road Boyz by Sufiyaan Salam is published on 28 May.
