An author who said she defied expectations to write children’s books believes her family’s love of reading helped her fulfil her dream. <\/p>\n
Nadia Shireen, from Wellington in Shropshire, has had a series of picture books published by Penguin, but recalls growing up at a time when people from south Asian backgrounds were rarely seen as writers.<\/p>\n
She said: “I was growing up in the 80\u2018s and authors were not people who like me or like my mum or dad.<\/p>\n
“If you were south Asian, you [were] obviously encouraged to get a good education and get a steady [job], become a doctor, a lawyer, accountant, or any of those things,” she added.<\/p>\n
What made the difference, she believes, was being encouraged to read from a young age.<\/p>\n
She said: “I was lucky enough to grow up in a house of readers.<\/p>\n
“Every week my mum would take me to Wellington library and she would go off and get Agatha Christies and I would go off into the children’s book area and I would have a whale of a time just kind of going through all the books.<\/p>\n
“It was just woven into everyday life,” she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An author who said she defied expectations to write children’s books believes her family’s love of reading helped…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":787327,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-787326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/787326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=787326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/787326\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/787327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=787326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=787326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=787326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}