An acclaimed British Bangladeshi author is attracting great reviews for her second novel, written after months of research into the issue of homelessness in the British city of Leicester.Mahsuda Snaith’s recently released ‘How to Find Home’ is about a homeless girl who goes on a ‘Wizard of Oz’ style adventure from Nottingham in the East Midlands region of England to the seaside town of Skegness. Spending time with the homeless community and listening to their stories helped the 37-year-old Leicester-based writer challenge her own misconceptions and made her realise that homelessness can happen to anyone.
“A few things can go wrong in your life and that’s all it takes for you to end up on the streets,” she said.
Mahsuda spent a lot of time researching the novel, undergoing six weeks of training with the New Futures Project, a local Leicester charity that supports sex workers. She then went on to volunteer at a soup kitchen offering food to the homeless, before doing a writing residency at a homeless hostel.
“It was really important for me to do the research and get it right because this is a group that gets misrepresented already,” said the author, who was tipped as ‘The Observer’s New Faces of Fiction’ in 2017 with the success of her first book ‘The Things We Thought We Knew’.
“It feels surreal to think of myself as a published writer because it’s something I’ve always wanted to do since I was about eight,” she said.
However, the journey to being a celebrated author has not been an easy one for her. Growing up on a state-owned council housing estate in Leicester, Mahsuda was one of a handful of people from the area who aspired to a university education and went on to study English Literature and Education Studies at De Montfort University (DMU).
“I would say that my writing is very working class and definitely focuses on people who are not normally represented in literature,” she said.
She is currently commissioned as a writer for the Colonial Countryside Project, the UK’s national writing and history project based at the University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing.