Last modified on Tue 26 Jan 2021 12.42 EST The architect Louis Kahn once wrote that “a city is the place of availabilities. It is the place where a small boy, as he walks through it, may see something that will tell him what he wants to do his whole life.” In my immediate vicinity, a working-class area of Sheffield, there wasn’t much suggestion that a writing career might be open to someone like me. Few of the people I was taught about at school were from a place like mine, or even wrote about such a place in other than reductive terms. On the few occasions we were taught about black – mostly African American – novelists, their work was delivered drily by our teachers; again, people with whom I had very little in common.