Fatima Farheen Mirza, 27, was born and raised in California. Her father grew up in Hyderabad, her mother in a British-Indian family in Birmingham. After starting pre-med classes, Mirza switched to creative writing and later gained a place at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, whose alumni include Ann Patchett and Curtis Sittenfeld. Her debut novel, A Place for Us, is the first book published by Sarah Jessica Parker’s new imprint for Hogarth – the Pulitzer-prizewinning novelist Paul Harding called it “a work of extraordinary and enthralling beauty”. The novel explores tensions within a devout Muslim family in California around the turn of the 21st century.