M.Y. Alam has worked as a social researcher, ambulance driver and snooker hall manager. Currently he is working on his third novel. He has a BSc in South Asian Area Studies as well as a 100 metres swimming certificate which he bought off the internet.

You begin to get the picture? Yunis is a laconic, but his seemingly disinterested exterior masks a passionate commitment and the ability to deliver sudden and savage violence. The passionate commitment is real, the violence fictional, to date he has not got them mixed up, at least not to my knowledge.

His two novels Kilo and Annie Potts is Dead are set in inner city Bradford and deal with decent people struggling with their own sense of who they could be and the criminal world they just can’t seem to disentangle themselves from. He combines noirish style with the cold brutal love any writer needs to write honestly about their home city and its communities.

Yunis is also a teacher and researcher at the University of Bradford, interested in mass media, communications and popular culture; his research topics have included ethnicity and the media, identity and popular culture.   He has worked on a number of books, editing the crime fiction anthology Criminally Minded which was featured in the publication Next Stop Hope and helping people to tell their own stories for Windrush Carnival Arrival Here.