Back at her old college, author Mariam Ansar is relaxed in sneakers and a jumpsuit layered over a white blouse. A copy of Good for Nothing lies on the table: described as a “tender, witty and heartfelt coming of age story that redefines small town mentalities”, her book is the culmination of an eight-year writing process, exploring grief and police prejudice through three teenagers whose narratives converge after a community service order.

“I want these characters to feel real, I think especially because they’re under-represented voices”

Ansar also works as an English teacher at a secondary school. When asked about her career, she says she’d always liked the idea of teaching, but felt the social pressure at university to “make something of yourself … because everybody in your year group is going to do it”. A stint in journalism left her dissatisfied – Ansar recalls accepting an internship at Buzzfeed, but felt her skills were underutilised, citing a “witty” piece being brutally condensed into a series of gifs. Now she’s back in Bradford, sharing anecdotes of classroom antics with her friends and family. Her students have a profound effect on her writing, acting as a sounding board, influencing her style and even helping her to choose between book titles.

“I want all the children who make trouble in class to laugh.” She says if the novel feels authentic “it’s because I was thinking would the kids in my class like this? Would they find it funny? And if they wouldn’t laugh then I just wouldn’t write it.” Ansar hopes her pupils will connect with the book’s setting, too: “if they couldn’t say ‘I’ve been to that supermarket’, or walked in that park … it just wouldn’t work in the same way.” “My students are from deprived communities”, she says. “I want these characters to feel real, I think especially because they’re under-represented voices.”

In part she feels responsible for widening pupils’ access to cultural capital, while not talking down to them. Her students know how much she loves Shakespeare (”Miss if you like him so much, why don’t you just marry him?“) but she emphasises her ability to code-switch, using the classroom to talk about everything from the celebrated bard to notorious bars. To the room, her love for teaching young people is obvious. To her students, she says “they should stop commenting on my TikToks”.

“I want people to recognise the humanity of people and qualities that can seem abrasive, or angry, but are actually just misunderstood”

When asked about her influences, she mentions Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. Her language is peppered with references to Wordsworth and Sylvia Plath. Many of the South Asian works she mentions however are comedies: Ansar cites the sketch comedy show Goodness Gracious Me for its pioneering wit and sharp satire, and the 1999 film East is East as one of the first testaments to British South Asian communities for her. The conversation acknowledges the strides in South Asian representation on screen but Ansar admits she’s also a “traditionalist”, preferring the more conventional routes of publishing and realism, stating that “realism gives dignity to communities”.

For Ansar, part of giving dignity is allowing communities to exist as they are, in a way that is unsanitised and uncensored “like the boy in your classroom that you always found so annoying”. Influenced by kitchen sink realism, one of the protagonists in Good for Nothing, Amir, embodies this: “I want people to recognise the humanity of people and qualities that can seem abrasive, or angry, but are actually just misunderstood”.

She expresses frustration at cases of what she perceives as “representation for the sake of representation”, where the audience feels that plot is traded in for a box-ticking exercise in diversity. “I’m very specific about what TV shows I’m going to watch.” She’s also cautious of reductionist language when critiquing the literary canon: “texts aren’t just selected because they’re written by white men”. To some extent, she thinks classic literature “speak[s] to the human experience”. But this doesn’t negate the necessity to include marginalised voices in the canon (Ansar mentions signing Lola Olufemi’s open letter to decolonise the English Faculty in 2017) or to support authors from minority backgrounds creating narratives on their own terms. The key is to produce art that offers representation “in a way that’s not tokenised, or sensationalised, or one-dimensional”.

“I got frustrated because I came to [Cambridge] university and spent so long refining my taste in art, and seeing that so many of these narratives that were incredible and brought me to tears only focused on specific backgrounds. It felt like there was this big gap between convincing and realistic stories for South Asian communities that I was genuinely moved by … texts that spoke to my experience.”

“a love letter to every forgotten northern town, every young person of colour that has struggled to feel understood”

“I wanted to create narratives that feel real and that move people because I’m from a community that is underrepresented, but also underprivileged and misunderstood – not just in terms of race – but in class and culture and community.”

Now she’s working to create new images of Muslims, ethnic minorities and working class communities in the media. What motivates her? “A lot of spite.” Proving the naysayers wrong is charged by the belief that “you are good enough”. Ansar believes that the different facets of her identity give her access to lots of different vantage points – the Bradford girl, the Cambridge graduate, the British Pakistani, the Muslim woman. These she tries to channel into her work: “turn your marginalisation into a strength”. She hopes that her book will serve as “a love letter to every forgotten northern town, every young person of colour that has struggled to feel understood”.

Ansar is not short on strengths: her writing was selected for the 2017 Mays Anthology by pop icon Kate Bush. At Cambridge, she remembers writing for Varsity and getting involved with FLY, but managed to avoid the Union, explaining that she prefers discussion over debate. The idea of value comes up again and again: “is it going to make you kinder and is it going to open you up more?” Whether at university or beyond, Ansar’s advice is repeatedly to ignore what others are doing and to “trust your values and instincts”. Ultimately she voices the “hope that this uni generates more than just intelligence”.

Now she wants to organise a school trip to Cambridge, but insists it’s not for the high fliers. “It would be for the students who tell me they let off fireworks in the park, or the students who tell me their dad was angry with them last night.” She wants to bring the students “who are always in detention or who just come to my room and linger instead of going out for break time … because they don’t know what Cambridge is”. There’s a certain sense of pride in her voice as she talks about them:

“Yeah they won’t be allowed to walk on the grass, but they’re still going to try!”