It was recently chosen as UK readers’ favourite book of the year, over Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and The Girl on the Train.

The book has been an unquestionable success. Because, while these 21 writers don’t only write about race, or want to, they need to, “because we’re done justifying our place at the table”. “This constant anxiety we feel as people of colour to justify our space … continues to hound us,” writes Shukla. It was originally inspired by a Guardian comment, of all things: below a piece where an Asian journalist had interviewed several authors who happened to be people of colour, a commenter wondered if they were all perhaps friends. It was crowfunded directly by readers, reaching its goal in three days (after JK Rowling inspired a surge via a tweet and pledged £5,000 herself). The book is made up of pieces by 21 emerging writers exploring what it means to be black, Asian or minority ethnic in Britain today. A lot.Ĭultural misappropriation is one of the many themes of this book of essays, edited by Shukla himself. Namaste is thrown at Shukla again, this time as a defiant retort from two young neighbours when he asks them to turn down their music at 2am. He’s outside an arts space that’s “part bar/club, part sustainable restaurant, part hot-desking for freelance artists and part dance studio” tellingly, namaste is defined by Urban Dictionary as: “a word thrown around by Trustafarians and hippies as they shop in Whole Foods while wearing their eco-green Birkenstocks”. “It just means hello,” says a bewildered Nikesh Shukla to a woman who repeats the Hindi word to him while offering him her henna stained hands. The Good Immigrant starts, appropriately, with an essay titled Namaste.

The good immigrant authors