Celebrated by The Guardian as “a standard‑bearer for a new generation of literary novelists”, Sufiyaan Salam began his ascent in the literary world when he won the #Merky New Writers Prize in 2024. His short film MAGID/ZAFAR (co-written with Luís Hindman) won a BIFA in 2025 and was nominated for a BAFTA earlier this year. He was also chosen as one of The Observer’s Best Debut Novelists of 2026, and his debut novel WIMMY ROAD BOYZ is out today in the UK.
Sufiyaan’s work explores the interpersonal relationship and inner struggles of the British Asian diaspora, questioning pre-conceptions of masculinity. WIMMY ROAD BOYZ, is “a coming-of-age story with men who aren’t equipped to deal with the actual coming of age bit”, as he told The Observer. On the other hand, MAGID / ZAFAR (معجد / ظفیر) (now streaming on Channel 4) is a masterful short movie about tumultuous relationship between two childhood friends against the backdrop of a busy British Pakistani restaurant. In both cases, the story telling is characterised by the energy of place, music and conversations that create a unique portrayal of inner turmoil and the masks we wear. Drawing inspiration from the places he grew up in, personal experiences and his passion for music, Sufiyaan discusses his debut and his short film, the parallels between creative mediums and his sources of inspiration.
You are a writer at 360 degrees – you write novels, short stories, movies and even worked with animation. How does your creative process differ depending on the medium?
I feel like with every project I take on, I’m having to learn how to do it all over again. I have to let each project teach me what it needs. I’m not sure this necessarily depends on the medium, though. Even when I was working as an animator, the basic workflow was the same: I start with a vague feeling about a something that doesn’t yet exist, I slowly wrestle it into existence by returning to that idea again and again. You really are just sculpting something over time in the blind hope that by the end, something good’ll turn up.
Although, a material difference between, prose and screenwriting is that making a film is way more collaborative the whole way through, whereas writing a novel is very lonesome. I can burn through way more ideas on a film project, with the faith that the bad ones will be shot down immediately. A book is all me though, or at least, it’s all me for way longer, so feels a lot more exposing! Therefore, process-wise, before I start on a book, I’m really trying to be an expert and absorb absolutely as much as I can. That doesn’t mean I need to know exactly where the story is going, only that I need to trick myself into becoming the only person in the world who could ever write it.
As a writer working on both books and film, do you want your work across disciplines to be seen as in conversation with each other, and if so in what ways do you think MAGID / ZAFAR is in conversation with WIMMY ROAD BOYZ?
I’ve not thought about it much, but it is true that different works do just bleed into each other, and probably interesting connections will pop up between different projects. Both MAGID / ZAFAR and WIMMY ROAD BOYZ were conceived of around the same time, so there’s definitely a bit of a link between them. On one level, both projects are about men hiding their true selves behind high-energy performances of bravado. There’s also specifically some character stuff going on in the novel that is directly subverting and playing off a dynamic featured in the film. But there’s smaller connections too. For example, the characters in WIMMY ROAD BOYZ visit a restaurant called Tastes of Lahore, which just so happens to be the name of the restaurant in MAGID / ZAFAR. Is it the same exact restaurant? Could both stories even be taking place on the same day? Alas, it’s not for me to say.
Overall, on an aesthetic level across any mediums, I’m interesting in maximalist work that explodes stereotypes, whiplashes an audience with joy and heartbreak all at once and, most important of all, uses to its advantage all the coolest part of both the British and Asian iconography I’m lucky to have inherited.
MAGID/ZAFAR unfolds through fast, dynamic footage that mirrors the hectic pace of its busy setting, moving among hungry schoolchildren, intrusive relatives, and overworked chefs. The deliberate use of space generates a strong, dramatic effect, crafting a location that immerses the viewer through consistently close shots. How much this kind of visual language influences the writing of a script at its earliest stages, when the narrative, characters, and structure are not yet set in stone.
For me, a big difference between prose and screenwriting is that whilst I can just dilly-dallyingly scramble my way through the blank pages of a novel without a super clear or defined structure, I find it completely necessary to nail an outline before going into a script. So, the entire shape of MAGID / ZAFAR was fully figured out before I ever started typing it. Writing, for me should be the absolute last step of the process. Luís, director and co-writer of MAGID/ZAFAR, and I also knew we needed to use the form of the short film to our advantage; with a short film, you are telling a story within a very compressed timeframe, therefore, the characters themselves had to be working against time constraints. They enter late and leave early — the whole movie is basically just a ‘second act’, and had this very specific, almost manic energy built into it from the beginning. Especially because we were making a film, we were thinking about it in images from the very beginning, giving it a ‘cinematic’ foundation. Once we’d decided that the film would be set in a tiny, stressful Pakistani restaurant, we knew we’d be mirroring Magid’s emotions, and that each section of the restaurant (the ‘front of house’, the kitchen, the pantry) represented different layers of performance he’s putting on as armour; he’s well-behaved in front of customers but rages in front of the other chefs, etc.
Because of all of this work up-front, I was able to go into the script knowing the kind of energy it needed to have, for example, by using what is script language is called “fast-cutting”., Over the course of our 30+ drafts, Luís and I tried to make sure we always knew where Magid was at headspace-wise, and what to introduce to reflect that, whether it was a sea of new customers or more and more things going wrong in the kitchen. But then the script evolves again once its handed our talented actors, and again as its being shot, and in post-production. While writing the script, I felt it was quite ‘visual’ in its descriptions, but compared to the actual final film, it probably reads very bare. That’s the magic of film. You try and make a great piece of literature that can serve as the foundation for something, and then, everyone who comes onboard to make it, needs to just completely blow that foundation out of the water.
You use language and dialogue in a very unique way. Your work seems to always be preoccupied not just with language per se, but with rhythm and the musicality of speech, like in the opening paragraph of WIMMY ROAD BOYZ, or in MAGID/ZAFAR, where the first line of dialogue is “calm music, calm cooking.” Could you tell me a bit more about how music influences your writing?
To be real, I’d have loved to be a rapper in another life, but I just suck at it. Certainly, I can write bars, but everything else, I’m just bad at. So, I’m stuck writing books instead. I’ve loved rap music since I was a kid (we used to listen to Tupac when we were in primary school), and just think those guys are doing the most interesting, Shakespearean stuff right now, proper imaginative use of language and rhythm. How else could you describe something like Lost Boyz’ Renee as anything but the highest literature? But I’m inspired by all sorts of music, I’m a real Radio 6-head. I listen to as much as I can. I even learnt from Sabrina Carpenter— ‘walked in and dream-came-true’d it for ya’ is crazy work, and very reminiscent of Herman Melville’s writing Growing up I listened to recitations of the Quran, as well as songs in Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi. Even now, I listen to a lot of stuff in languages I don’t speak, from Rosalia to OG Keemo, and the thing that I learnt is that the lyrics aren’t really as important as the way it all sounds, right?
So, for me, an aspiring musician without a single musical gift, the only instrument at my disposal is language, so my goal is to make the sentences sound as good as possible. Kind of like Jay Z’s process in the booth – I freestyle each new chapter, all off the dome, spitting paragraphs that sound how I want them to sound, even if they don’t necessarily make sense yet. Then I just keep writing the chapter over and over trying to get the rhythm right, subbing in real words, or at least, words that feel legible to the reader.
I also like having playlists for different projects I’m working on — I usually don’t write whilst listening to them, but they can get me in the right headspace, teach me new things about my work. For MAGID / ZAFAR, almost all of the music that makes it into the film was written into the script. We knew our soundtrack would be this huge mesh of different South Asian music, from Swet Shop Boys to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to M.I.A (though it’s one thing to write this in a script, another to actually get the rights). The one song I did listen to whilst writing was the piece that plays in the final scene of the film — Lost Song by Ioana Selaru and Ross K. There’s just no world in which that scene would have worked without it.
In MAGID/ZAFAR, Magid works in a takeaway restaurant, where the tensions of a busy day at work collide with family, cultural and romantic tensions. Your debut novel, WIMMY ROAD BOYZ, is set on Manchester’s famous Curry Mile. I wanted to ask you more about the role and importance of food as a narrative device, and why it appeals to you for storytelling.
The food thing didn’t feel like a specific choice for either project, weirdly. I guess food is a specific centre-point for British-Asian characters, sure, but it’s also just this timeless, universal, human thing. We all have different rituals around food, centring catch-ups with friends, family gatherings, even dating around it. InWIMMY ROAD BOYZ, I find it interesting that it is about of three young men on a night out, but instead of going the club, they’re on a street filled with restaurants and shisha bars. To me, this is just a more fun backdrop to deliver their stories against. The three characters are in a sort of stasis, mostly stuck in their car as they do laps up and down the Curry Mile, struggling to find parking and somewhere to sit down and have a meal. There’s a real lack of stability to this that just appealed to mein the way it tells a larger story of diaspora kids struggling to find their place in the world.
Same thing with MAGID / ZAFAR — the restaurant setting simply places Magid in a high-stress work environment that allows him to bury his personal anxieties. But the story would feel very different if it was set in a Nandos, or a busy pub. The specificity of a place that has the flag of Pakistan, framed pictures of cricketer Imran Khan, a stereo that blasts qawwalis just shifts the energy, makes it way more specific, more rooted in Magid’s actual, material life. When he’s worrying about having to answer his phone, he’s also having to rustle up real complex dishes, stuff he grew up eating. The restaurant isn’t touristic, it’s local, it’s family-oriented, it’s homely… all these things Magid wishes he could feel, but doesn’t, at least, not yet.
But, as with a lot of choices made during the writing, I have to admit that a lot of this came later. At first, I was really just following an instinct — I’ve been going to these kind of restaurants all my life, so the setting wasn’t thought as a great metaphor to explore the emotional and political realities of the characters. It was just a cool image. Everything else came later.
In the short, Magid and Zafar never appear together in the same frame; on the rare occasions their images intersect, it is only through over-the-shoulder shots, where the foreground actor tries to intrude on the other actor’s space, visually reinforcing their separation. Luís, director and co-writer, in another interview with Directors Notes, said that this decision was made during the shooting. Similarly, reading WIMMY ROAD BOYZ, some of the most vital scenes jump from character to character rather than portraying them together, presenting them as isolated individuals within a group dynamic. Could you tell me more about what it means to write intimacy between men and how your stylistic choices impacted the development of your characters and their interactions?
A lot the writing of WIMMY ROAD BOYZ was very instinctive. As I said earlier, sometimes “making a choice” is just me noticing something I’ve already been doing and deciding to formalise it. I knew from the beginning that the form of a novel would be perfect for exploring the very specific feeling of being on a night out with all these emotions doing fireworks in your chest whilst you’re trying to stay cool on the surface, not let any of it leak out. That’s what the free-indirect style is perfect for, the big innovation that makes novels stand out from other mediums. I knew I could use it to my advantage, dipping in and out of the character’s thoughts, showing just how lonely it is to be a person. And so, we’re moving like we’re a camera between the characters — but in a way an actual camera can’t move — peering into all the things they’re thinking at the same time they are specifically choosing not to share any of it. There’s even a bit in the book where the narrator describes how a character hasn’t yet told the reader about something going on in his personal life, showing that even though we literally have access to his thoughts, the repression goes so deep that we’ve still been denied.
In terms of form, there’s a moment in WIMMY ROAD BOYZ where the main characters, Immy, Khan and Haris, all go their separate ways, and the book literally falls apart for a bit. This was a specific structural choice that I thought would give a lot of gravity to the magnitude of their feelings: they could all be there for each other, if only they weren’t so blindsided by their own struggles. In fact, the only way Immy can get certain things off his chest is by blurting them out to basically a stranger — a woman! — during an intimate encounter. So, chapter after chapter, we’re just flung in the middle of very different scenes that happen simultaneously for each of the boys. The book is about three boys on a night out together — them splitting up literally threatens a narrative collapse. We need them to patch up, or the book itself will buckle under the pressure!
What advice would you give to creatives who have stories to tell, but are working on finding their medium and the right way to tell them?
Keep playing. Have fun. Deep-dive into every tiny thing you find interesting. Download the Wikipedia app. Study all the things you hate and try and improve on them. Consult Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (specifically, the 1913 edition). Don’t know what form an idea should take? Keep spinning it around. Study the medium itself. What is something only a novel can do? What is something only a film can do? Why not write a cinematic novel, or a novelistic play, or a theatrical film? Find bad ideas and take them seriously. Find good ideas and rip them apart. What happens if you break the form of the novel? What is the one thing you must never do in a film? Imagine Zadie Smith reading your work back to you or David Fincher giving you notes on your film. What if they swapped? What would you change?
