Roopa Farooki is a British novelist. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, to a Pakistani father and Bangladeshi mother in 1974, they moved to London when she was seven months old. Roopa studied PPE at New College, Oxford University, worked in Corporate Finance and then as an Advertising Account Director, before she turned to writing fiction full-time. She later qualified as a junior doctor and now works for the NHS in London and Kent.
Novels
She wrote her first novel, Bitter Sweets, while pregnant with her first child, and renovating a house in SW France. Bitter Sweets was first published in the UK in 2007, and shortlisted for the Orange Award for New Writers that year. She published her second novel, Corner Shop, in 2008. Her third novel, The Way Things Look To Me, was published in 2009, and was voted one of The Times Top 50 Paperbacks of 2009, long-listed for the Orange Prize 2010, and has been long-listed for the Impac Dublin Literary Award 2011. Her fourth novel, Half Life, was published in 2010, and was selected by Entertainment Weekly as No. 2 on their list of "Eighteen Books We Can't Wait to Read This Summer"; it was also nominated for the InternationalMuslim Writers Awards 2011. Her fifth novel, The Flying Man was published in January 2012 in the UK, and has been longlisted for the Orange Prize 2012. Her sixth novel, The Good Children, was published in 2015, and was featured on BBC Radio FourOpen Book. Farooki's novels have been published in English internationally and in translation in a dozen languages across Europe. After graduating as a Doctor, Farooki has turned to children's fiction featuring female BAME protagonists, with The Double Detectives Medical Mystery series at Oxford University Press. The first book, The Cure for A Crime, was published in 2020.
Personal life
Roopa Farooki is the daughter of the late Nasir Ahmad Farooki, a Pakistani novelist and a prominent figure in Pakistani literary circles in the 1960s. Roopa's father abandoned her when she was 13, later marrying a Chinese American. Her mother, Nillufer, later had a long term relationship with an English-Iraqi of Jewish descent. Despite being of both Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent, she speaks only English because her parents were keen on assimilating into London and spoke to her in only English. Farooki cites her father as an inspiration, and has written frankly about her relationship with her father and his influence on her work in the UK national press. She has also written about her experiences of eczema, relationship counselling, and fertility treatment. Her recent novels have featured characters with Asperger's Syndrome, and Bipolar Disorder. She currently lives in southwest France and southeast England with her Anglo-Irish husband, two sons, and twin daughters, and teaches creative writing. She has been a lecturer on the Masters programme in Prose Fiction at Canterbury Christchurch University and an undergraduate lecturer at the University of Kent in England. She currently teaches on the Masters programme at the University of Oxford. She is also the Ambassador for the UK relationship counselling charity, Relate. In 2019, she completed a postgraduate degree in Medicine from St George's University of London, commencing work as a junior doctor in London and Kent. Farooki has four children: twin girls and two boys.
Acceptance
Farooki's novels have been critically well received, and she has been compared to other British female novelists, Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith and Monica Ali. In an interview with the Metro in 2010, headlined, "Nationality is Not The Issue", she said she was flattered by the comparisons, but said that a key difference was that she had made a deliberate decision not to focus on cultural clash in her novels, and to write universal stories.
