this is bbc news — our latest headlines. england have scored six goals for the first time in a world cup. harry kane hit a hat trick in the match against panama in russia. hejoins geoff hurst he joins geoff hurst and hejoins geoff hurst and gary lineker by hitting a hat—trick in a world cup match. new measures aimed at halving the number of obese children in england by 2030 have been announced by the government. voting is underway in turkey's presidential and parliamentary elections — the biggest challenge to president erdogan‘s 15 years in government. women in saudi arabia are officially allowed to get behind the wheel of a car, after the authorities lifted a ban on them driving. we'll have more on the england panama game shortly, but first, here's meet the author. three generations of immigrants from kenya, three lifetimes

of struggle — and not only with the attitudes that mukesh meets when he arrives in yorkshire, falls in love and starts a family. nikesh shukla's novel the one who wrote destiny is also about struggles inside themselves — the daughter who struggles with cancer, a son who chooses a career as a comedian but unfortunately isn't terribly funny. but the book is, despite its unflinching exploration of racism. welcome. it would be very easy on this subject to write a very angry book, you know, a brittle book, full of fire. and there is anger in this book, but fundamentally it's very funny. do you think that's a better way of doing it? yes, i've read a lot of very heavy books about immigration and race in the last three years.

i edited a collection of essays called the good immigrant, and i am by nature a comedy writer, so i wanted to get to something that got to the heart of these people and these wonderful characters. and there is this old steve allen quote about how comedy is time plus tragedy, and what better way to talk about tragedy than through the prism of comedy? well, then it is a human comedy. and it features a comedian, raq, who is not very good, who — i mean, his career is not going anywhere, and he wonders why. and everyone else knows, and i think the reader knows. it's because he's really not terribly funny. i have a real soft spot for raqs. i think he's one of those people who, when he finds his voice, he will start to do better. he's kind of still messing about with who he is. we are talking about raqs, but he is only one

of the characters. and really the engine of the story is the arrival of a kenyan immigrant, in the 1950s, who settles not in london, which would be the normal for the era, but goes to yorkshire and keighley and discovers that it isn't rock ‘n‘ roll and girls and all the things he expected. it's slightly different. so you are immediately taking the story off its axis. and it's based on the true story of my uncle who came to the uk in the 1960s, and i think, because we had relatives in huddersfield, bradford, just wasn't. .. he didn't have a network in london, to be able to find lodgings that were happy with having coloured folk, so he ended up in keighley. and, even though my entire family now live in london, where they were meant to end up, i think that's really — and i don't really have much of a connection with keighley. and the story stretches

over three generations. there is one particularly poignant strand in the story, which is the daughter who has inherited the cancer that killed — the gene that produced the cancer that killed her mother, and knows that she is going to die. i mean, you are taking it head—on there. yes, it's — i wanted, with this book, to write some british south asian characters that you just don't see. and, you know, too often the books that get published by british authors from a south asian background often tend to be about identity or radicalisation, or arranged marriages. and myjoke has always been that true diversity will come when we get a brown writer writing that literary fiction where a middle—aged, middle—class creative writing professor has sex with one of his impossibly attractive

younger students and is a bit sad for 300 pages. so my version of that was to try and write about a stand—up comedian, and the immigrant who didn't end up in london, and, you know, the internal life of someone wrestling with mortality. and also, there isn't — i don't think there's much fiction written from the perspective of kenyan indians whose families ended up in the uk. we talk about three generations, and they're all told in a very immediate way. and we see the kind of things, whether it's a question of health or love life or professional achievement, the things that all families go through, worrying about. but it's fascinating to hear you talking about the way you want these people to appear to be shedding, you know, the usual accoutrements of immigrant families being written about. well, yes, and more to be an honest representation of immigrant families that are out there.

and so, you know, they go through all the very universal things that you describe, but sometimes those things are seen through the prism of race, because sometimes, being a person of colour in this country, that element of your life is inescapable. my dad was attacked by nf members in the ‘60s, and he nearly died. and to him, that is racism, that visceral violence on his body. the sharp end. yes, and so when i come home and complain about kids calling me curry boy, and saying i look dirty, my complexion... he says, "you ain't seen nothing." yes, and actually, it was things in the lead—up to brexit, where you kind of saw all the narrative around immigration turn quite toxic, and you saw the breaking point poster, that my dad and i started to meet in the middle a little bit more, and we were able to kind of — he was able to kind of appreciate the scale of these things. so my uncle — in 1968, he tried to buy a house

in huddersfield, and he was refused. they wouldn't sell the house to him, because he was brown, and they didn't want to devalue the area. and the race relations act had just come in, that very year. and he said, you know, that is now illegal. and my uncle is the first person to ever bring a case of race discrimination under the race relations act. and all of this stuff kind of crops up in the book. and the judgement was reserved, because it was a test case, and so there was a technicality that meant that the judge had to reservejudgement. but he did say in his summation that discrimination had occurred, and that the company did change their policy after that. but my uncle and i are talking about this in 2017, when i was kind of working on edits of the book, and we see this news story of this landlord in kent who has been taken to court because he won't rent out properties to asians, because they stink the place out with curry. and my unclejust said to me, sometimes i see these things

and remember how far we haven't come. what about your generation, and a generation younger than you? do you think that in london, for example, kids of ten, i2, 15, are much less prone to the old attitudes than their parents? generation? well, that's interesting. so i live in bristol, and i've been a youth worker for the last four years. ijust finished up on a project earlier this year. and the thing that i saw with all the young people i worked with is that they're so much more politically progressive than my generation is. and, you know, when we talk about identity politics, which is sort of the stick that the alt—right beats the left with, and so on and so forth, for young people, the sense of identity is so much more fluid and ingrained in the way that they converse that i don't — it's not so much removed from them that they necessarily need to talk about it. so i have real hope for the next generation.

and in a way the book traces that journey, not in a sort of crude polemical way, but through the experience of one family, with all its ups and downs. in that sense, quite apart from the fun and laughter in the book, it's a story of hope, isn't it? yes, i would like to think so. i think, without giving too much away, i think it ends on an interesting note of hope. yes. but i think what that is about is about freeing yourself from the shackles of fate and destiny, and trying to forge your own path. and so much of each of our characters‘ journeys is about, like, the precarious balance between forging your own path and giving yourself to what was written. and this act that happens towards the end of the book, i hope, is a moment of hope. my book is an attempt to kind of reconcile what i think is a version of a multicultural britishness that i always wanted

to try and find peace with, growing up. and the title is an interesting one, given what you were talking about vis—a—vis the end of the book, and it sets people on the path, i think. nikesh shukla, author of the one who wrote destiny, thanks very much.