Monica Ali (born 20 October 1967) is a Bangladeshi-born British writer and novelist. In 2003 she was selected as one of the "Best of Young British Novelists" by Granta magazine based on her unpublished manuscript; her debut novel, Brick Lane, was published later that year. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name. She has published three additional novels.
Ali was born in Dhaka, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1967 to a Bangladeshi father and English mother. When she was three, her family moved to Bolton, England. Her father is originally from the district of Mymensingh. She went to Bolton School and then studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Wadham College, Oxford.
Brick Lane:
Brick Lane - named after Brick Lane, a street at the heart of London’s Bangladeshi community - follows the life of Nazneen, a Bangladeshi woman who moves to London at the age of 18, to marry an older man, Chanu. They live in Tower Hamlets. At first her English consists only of “sorry" and “thank you;” the novel explores her life and adaptations in the community, as well as the character of Chanu, and their larger ethnic community. The novel provoked controversy within the Bangladeshi community in Britain. Some groups thought Ali had negatively portrayed people from the Sylhet region, as they constitute the majority of the Bangladeshi immigrants living in the Brick Lane community.
The Observer described Chanu as “one of the novel’s foremost miracles: twice her age, with a face like a frog, a tendency to quote Hume and the boundless doomed optimism of the self-improvement junkie, he is both exasperating and, to the reader at least, enormously loveable.” Geraldine Bedell wrote in The Observer that the “most vivid image of the marriage is of her [Nazneen] cutting her husband’s corns, a task she seems required to perform with dreadful regularity. [Her husband] is pompous and kindly, full of plans, none of which ever come to fruition, and then of resentment at Ignorant Types who don’t promote him or understand his quotations from Shakespeare or his Open University race, ethnicity and class module.” The novel was well-received by critics in the United Kingdom and the United States, and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Film adaptation:
In 2007, the book was adapted as a film of the same name. Starring the Indian actress Tannishtha Chatterjee, the film was distributed both in the UK and internationally. When production was underway in 2006, some of the Bangladeshi community opposed Ruby Films' intention to film parts of the novel in the Brick Lane area. They formed the "Campaign Against Monica Ali’s Film Brick Lane.”
The writer and activist Germaine Greer expressed support for the campaign, writing in The Guardian: “As British people know little and care less about the Bangladeshi people in their midst, their first appearance as characters in an English novel had the force of a defining caricature ... [S]ome of the Sylhetis of Brick Lane did not recognize themselves. Bengali Muslims smart under an Islamic prejudice that they are irreligious and disorderly, the impure among the pure, and here was a proto-Bengali writer with a Muslim name, portraying them as all of that and more.”
Books of Monica Ali:
- Brick Lane (2003), Doubleday
- Alentejo Blue (2006), Doubleday
- In The Kitchen (2009), Doubleday
- Untold Story (2011), Scribner
Thanks a lot for reading, source of the writings: Wikipedia.
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