The books of my life / Saba Sams

 

Saba Sams

The 

Books

 0f my 

life

Saba Sams: ‘I’ve no interest in reading Wuthering Heights again’

The Send Nudes author on rereading Lorrie Moore, finding Dodie Smith at the right time, and the enduring brilliance of Muriel Spark

Saba Sams

Friday 6 March 2026

My earliest reading memory
I remember reading Jacqueline Wilson aloud to my mum in the car. I think it was The Illustrated Mum. My mum couldn’t believe it was a children’s book, and I felt so proud. I always found most children’s books overly virtuous and safe, but Wilson’s never were. I love her for that.

 

Saba Sams

Interview with Saba Sams, winner of the BBC Short Story

Interview by Sophie Haydock

The winner of 2022 BBC National Short Story Award was announced this week as London-based writer, Saba Sams. Following the announcement , we spoke to her about ‘Blue 4eva’ – the winning story.

A Conversation with Saba Sams

A Conversation with Saba Sams
by Madeleine Knowles

I wanted to start with a question about process because Gunk is your first novel and your last book, Send Nudes, was a short story collection, so I’d love to know whether your writing process changed at all? And were there any challenges when moving from short story to novel?

Saba Sams
Photo by Clay Stephen Gardner

At 28, Saba Sams Is Britain’s Brightest Debut Novelist

BY OLIVIA MARKS

25 April 202

“The fear is that motherhood will completely annihilate everything else about you,” says author Saba Sams, 28, as we meet ahead of the publication of her debut novel, Gunk, and just eight weeks after the birth of her baby son, her third child in seven years.

Keep Up by Saba Sams

 

Keep Up

by Saba Sams

I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports. I’ve been faking nausea, headaches and stomach aches since I was six. I remember sitting at my desk, cheek resting in the fold of my elbow, trying to look sorry for myself, little piles of clothes on the carpet all around me. This was when boys and girls still changed together in the classroom. When PE began with hauling apparatus from the edges of the gym into the middle. Balance beams, cracked blue crash mats, waxy hoops. I started my period when I was eleven. That was a far better excuse. I’d say I had cramps every week, no shame. My swimming teacher would panic the second he heard the word. Period. I could drop it like a tiny bomb, and he’d look at the scuzzy tiled floor and wave me off. Even then I liked words, liked seeing what a word could do. I couldn’t give a shit what a ball could do, but a word.

Saba Sams wins BBC national short story award for ‘transportive’ tale

 

Saba Sams wins BBC national short story award for ‘transportive’ tale

This article is more than 3 years old

The 26-year-old, who drafted the story about ‘complex family dynamics’ when she was 19, takes a £15,000 prize for the piece taken from her debut collection Send Nudes

Sarah Shaffi
4 October 2022

Saba Sams has won the BBC national short story award for a tale described by the judges as having a “transportive atmosphere” and “masterful telling of complex family dynamics”. The 26-year-old has received the £15,000 prize, run by the BBC with Cambridge University, and the audio version of her winning story Blue 4eva is available to listen to on BBC Sounds.

Saba Sams / ‘I wanted it to be sexy and really messy’

Saba Sams

Interview

Writer Saba Sams: ‘I wanted it to be sexy and really messy’

This article is more than 8 months old

The Send Nudes author, one of Granta’s pick of the best young British novelists, on young motherhood, feminism and why we need to break the rules around love

Lisa Allardice
Sunday 27 April 2025

Saba Sams was in bed breastfeeding her two-month-old baby when she received an email saying that the publisher Bloomsbury wanted to offer her a book deal on the basis of some of her short stories. She was just 22 at the time. “I didn’t even think it was a book,” she says when we meet. “I was just learning how to write.”

 

Saba Sams

BOOK OF THE DAY

Review

Gunk by Saba Sams review – boozy nights and baby love

This article is more than 8 months old

The Send Nudes author’s follow-up conveys a profound message about the insufficiency of the nuclear family

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

Fri 9 May 2025

To be selected for Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists list two years before your debut novel comes out must bring a certain amount of pressure. Saba Sams had already been named a rising star for her short-story collection, Send Nudes; one of the stories, Blue 4eva, won the 2022 BBC National short story award. Now comes Gunk, titled for the grotty student nightclub managed by the thirtysomething protagonist, Jules. The fried egg on the cover hints at a sleazy edge: expect hangover breakfasts with a dawn chorus soundtrack. It’s also a playful nod to more tender themes of fertility panic, unplanned pregnancy and young motherhood.

 

Saba Sams

Review

Send Nudes by Saba Sams review – sex and solitude

This article is more than 4 years old

The earthy resilience and joie de vivre of these stories about being a young woman today make for an exhilarating debut

Madeleine Feeny

Idon’t know if I was enjoying myself or just in a continual state of curiosity,” says Meg in Snakebite, one of 10 short stories in 25-year-old British author Saba Sams’s exceptional debut collection. Sams joins the ranks of writers such as Megan Nolan and Frances Leviston with these acute portraits of the fragile intimacies and euphoric moments snatched by a generation of women coming of age into a precarious future.

What Do You Know About Love? by Saba Sams

What Do You Know About Love?
by Saba Sams

She had touched many skins, but none like yours. Yours was the edge of something else. Your skin was your own, but also hers. She would struggle with this as she lay with you, resisting the softness.

The Whole Pear by Saba Sams

 

THE WHOLE PEAR, FICTION BY SABA SAMS

---

I’d started babysitting more regularly since moving in with Ivan. It wasn’t about the money. The rent at his flat was no higher than my last place. I did it because I liked the feeling of, having left, coming back. Surfacing on the tube to a text, Grab us some eggs? Striding through the wet streets, my cheap headphones scratching at my ears. The light going. Pit stopping in Sainsbury’s. Taking the stairs up to the flat, the soles of my trainers sticking to the lino, a Bag for Life slung over my shoulder. Letting myself in to find Ivan in the kitchen, a room that always looked too small for him, hunched over garlic cloves, tiny red chillies he’d grown in a pot on the windowsill. Remembering, in that moment, the first time I realised I was in love with him: the day he climbed over a garden fence to steal some pears from a stranger’s tree, and sat down next to me on the curb, eating them bottom to top, cores and all. I’d feel like a grown up, returning from work to this scene of domesticity, remembering the misadventures of youth.