Biography

In the name of Allah, The Most Merciful, The Most Kind.

My kunniyyah (family tree) is Mohammed Yaseen ibn Hassan ibn Fadhl ibn Atta ibn Bawal ibn Imam Bakhsh. I was born in Kashmir, Pakistan and at the age of six moved with my family to Sheffield, England, where my father worked in the steel mills.

I started to pick up the English language slowly at school. It was only at school where I could learn it as both my father and mother and even my elder sister could hardly speak a word of English.

I remember vividly my first encounter with the English language on my first day at school, when the teacher gave me a toy car repeating ‘car, car’. As in my mother tongue Punjabi, ‘kaa’ meant eat, I can remember giving her a strange look and thinking to myself that maybe this teacher had lost it, had gone mad all of a sudden, as how could I possibly eat a metal object! My teacher on the other hand may have been over the moon thinking that she had made a new discovery; a boy who didn’t like toy cars.

In primary school I had my first encounter with stories, in particular that of Roald Dahl's ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’. Mrs Dent my teacher at the time would sit us down on the carpet and every day would read a little of this exciting story to us. I just couldn’t wait for story time as I wanted to know what would happen next.

In secondary school I enjoyed English lessons but hated maths. My English teacher would enlighten us with her stories of her encounters with the supernatural. I have to say she was a very good story teller. To this day I am still in doubt as to how much of these stories were true and how much of them she had made up.

In my final year at secondary school, I wrote a story during one English class and showed it to my teacher. What he was about to say would dampen my interest in writing for a few years. He asked me first if I wanted an honest opinion. I said I did after which he told me that my story was absolutely rubbish and that one day I would look back at it and laugh at what I wrote. I was put off in being creative with the English language for some years.

For a number of years I went through an experimental phase with writing poetry in the Urdu language. Urdu was not my mother tongue and neither was I really fluent in it, however I did develop my poetry skills and gained considerable experience performing my poetry in public recitals (mushaairah) and on local radio.

Somehow I wasn’t convinced that I could be my best at being creative with the Urdu language and returned to write in English, after I stumbled on a book that had won a children’s book award and was published by the Islamic foundation.

I decided to enter the competition and the following year I wrote ‘The Colour Blind Boy’. After winning the 2nd prize in that competition, my story was subsequently published, becoming one of Islamic Foundation’s best sellers. My love for writing had been rekindled.

Mohammed Yaseen, 17^th July 2009