Gia Kran: A Barrister in London

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"I find Twitter fascinating for that. People see the world as they are not as it is," she says. "One of the great lessons of life I've learned is that I always used to think it was about me." Gia Kran has a very different family background and makes a different set of decisions. She's from a British Pakistani background, she's Poshpshtun. And when her father is killed and her brother kidnapped, she gets drawn back into this underworld.

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May.

'I am my childhood’s wildest dream,’ says Saima Mir. This episode is about the process of getting there, not just the determination and hard work, but also the intangibles: the beliefs, ambitions and understandings that you don’t even know how to articulate, but which hold you up on a decades-long journey to becoming.

In this conversation, the journalist and bestselling novelist talks about shame, failure, the experience of being gossiped about - but also the inner strength and family support that allowed her to reinvent herself after leaving her first two husbands. Saima came late to journalism, but forged a successful career on TV and in print before writing her genre-changing (or will it be genre-defining?) novel, The Khan. Here, she surveys that pathway to this place, and how it built her iconic character, Jia Khan.

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