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Ohand a stretch of Manchester street known for kebabs, shisha smoke and restless energy, three young men drive into a night that already feels like it’s going away. The concept of Wimmy Road Boyz, the first book written by the #Merky books that won the award for new writers Sufiyaan Salam, is deceptively simple: “three boyz cars and dream an impossible night in an endless road”. The next step is something else.
Salam’s book takes place one evening on the Curry Mile, the thickest artery of Rusholme nightlife, where a white BMW transports Immy, Khan and Haris through a series of conflicts, side-quests and misunderstandings. It’s a book about masculinity, violence and love, and about language – the way British boys talk, act and fail to express what’s going on in their heads.
At the age of 28, Salam is the bearer of a new generation of novelists. He grew up in Blackburn, a town he thought at the time was “where dreams can die”, due to racial tensions and extreme poverty. He said: “It’s a very racist place, and the ward I grew up in had some of the worst child poverty in the country. Being brown and Muslim in post-9/11 Britain, he remembers vague but unsettling feelings of alienation and fear. As a teenager, he used to wear a bag with flowers, thinking it would make him seem less dangerous. But his hometown also gave him “real pictures of human life”, several events that are now only fictionalized in his fiction.
Salam studied English literature at the University of Manchester, but writing for a living was impossible. “For me, it wasn’t something that would be a career in the real world,” he says. “You don’t even think it’s possible.”
His journey to publishing ended due to jealousy – Salam started writing Wimmy Road Boyz after attending the launch of a friend’s book in 2022 and thinking: “It should be me.” The short story version came second in the Bristol short story prize, which helped pay a month’s rent. He turned it into a book and was rejected by sponsors. But then came the # Merky book prize, which Salam won in 2024 with the first 5,000 words of the book.
Stormzywho started the brand, made a surprise appearance at the event. “It’s an amazing thing where you’re like, ‘man, life is about to change’,” Salam recalls of that day. He remembers little of his meeting with the rapper, except for one detail: “He is much taller than me, so I look much younger in the pictures,” he laughs.
The following Monday he returned to his job, writing a children’s TV documentary for the BBC in Manchester, but now he has nine months to finish his book. At the same time, he co-wrote Magid/Zafar, a short film shown in a British Pakistani takeaway, which won the Best British Film Award at the British Independent Film Awards and was nominated for a Bafta earlier this year.
This is clear in Wimmy Road Boyz: the drama, the poetry, the rap part, it has breaks, the chorus, the stage movements, the passages that turn to high notes before returning to slang. Salam describes the style as a deliberate hybrid: “I wanted it to feel Shakespearean on one level and then like Jay-Z lyric on others. And I don’t see any contradiction between these two things.
The implications are many: “It was a mix of Train spottingLa Haine, and Kendrick good boy, mAAd city.” He remembers reading Ulysses just before a British-Pakistani rap concert. If the word novel means something new, then let me try to do something new with it, reinvent it.’”
Written almost entirely in lowercase – a sign of gen Z – the language is simple and fun, full of hyper-niche references – esoteric internet rabbit holes, British-Asian youth culture. Did he worry about alienating readers by being blunt, and mainstream culture? He said: “I realized that nothing good comes from complacency or feeling guilty. “I don’t think when Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, he was like, ‘Man, maybe I should have put this in the UK instead of Denmark.’
The result is a book that feels as alive – as original, ambitious and disturbing – as the night it portrays. There is a sense that Manchester itself is being written into a documentary, from the perspective of a young person. One passage describes Rusholme as “a twisted, mycelial thing…
The book also tackles larger themes of mental health, depression, male vulnerability and stupidity. “I’ve always been interested in the things you take from masculinity — the idea of gender as drama, which is often discussed by women and trans people, but less so by men,” she says.
Instead, Salam takes the novel’s origin to a night out with friends during a crisis. “I really wanted to talk to one of the boys about it, but I couldn’t,” he recalls. “I thought, I’m having fun on the surface, but if you opened my brain right now, there’s all this madness going on.” The next day, he began to wonder: what if everyone else at night felt the same way? What if none of them said that?
However, he avoids turning his characters into symbols or moral lessons. One of his guiding principles was the rejection of the “immigrant” narrative – the idea that the stories of ethnic minorities should be redemptive and noble. “There’s no point in writing stuff like this if it’s not going to be true,” he says. In general, they want to show that identity is only one part among many. “These are British men who are struggling with things…
Salam’s sense of identity is inseparable from his experience of British culture. In recent times, this has become more volatile, with renewed ethnic tensions and extremism. A few weeks before moving to London in 2024, riots of various kinds spread in the cities of the UK – the Muslim cemetery in Blackburn, where his grandfather was buried, was destroyed. Salam found out through a viral video. He said: “It’s very sad what happens when you just want to live a good life.
The book is also in the midst of much discussion about the absence of male authors in contemporary fiction, and the decline in engagement with literature among boys. He said: “Many men don’t like to read books. “Probably the last book they ever read was The Great Gatsby at school.” At the same time, he points out that many of those same men are more interested in other complex, literary works. “When Drake and Kendrick’s beef it’s going down, a lot of guys were analyzing those words – video stories explaining every line – and that’s really a great poem.” “A lot of guys are arguing…
One of his ambitions with Wimmy Road Boyz is to open that gap, to meet the boys where they are, and to create a book that feels fast, powerful, rooted in culture, like music. He said: “It should be as relaxed as a conversation with the boys on a night out. “I wanted it to sound like a podcast, not just something dangerous.” In other words, he says: “It should be dirty like men do it.”
