Rewriting the North: Fox and Windmill

The story of how the new independent publisher Fox and Windmill Press came into being and the importance of place in identity by co-founder Habiba Desai.

Place and identity are strange things and often complicated. You can be born in one place and yet your culture and identity can be from another place entirely. Such is often the case with children of immigrants. When my mother arrived in the UK from India in 1982 at the tender age of eight, she and her nine siblings had to adapt to this strange and cold country. My mother recalls learning English at school but mostly through reading books. She had an appetite for stories and never really noticed how the children in those books were portrayed. Tales of white, often wealthy children who went to boarding schools and had comfortable lives full of opportunity. My mother’s own story was far from that.

No-one talks about the difficulties of the first-generation immigrant experience, leaving behind everything you know in a place that you thought you would always call home. Having to learn a new language, adopt the ways and habits of a new society and try and find where you belong. My mother did it with the help of her library and through the magic of reading. When we were born, books always seemed to be a natural part of our upbringing. My uncle would gather all the children and take us to explore the Bradford City Library which used to be attached to the National Media Museum. We would spend whole afternoons wandering through the stacks and hefting bags of books home. When we were older, we would visit our community library, Laisterdyke, where we would max out our library card (25 books each) and spend the entire week reading after school and then the following week we’d do the same. It became a ritual. As we read, my mother did too, she had moved to Catherine Cookson and Dilly Court in which she would find solace and resonance in the hard and difficult upbringing of the heroines.

We once watched The Wingless Bird together and my mother recalled the sweet shops when she was growing up, the little pocket money she had and what she would spend it on. The working-class stories and the family struggles were what my mother identified with. But still there were no people that looked like us, no characters that had wide imaginations, dreams of flying, falling in love, having superpowers, and becoming extraordinary. There was no room for that. The books that were churned out to fulfil the ‘tick box’ of diversity, were only stories that seemed to form from old exhaustive stereotypes, old cultural stigmas that were used to label our identity and for the longest time, it didn’t seem like we could write about anything else.

When me and Sara decided to begin our journey of Fox & Windmill, it was this moment that made us realise how poorly and misrepresented we were, both in books and on screen. Something had to change, we wanted fantasy books with a Pakistani heroine called Zainab whose family supported and loved her, we wanted romance between two people of different cultures, and it didn’t end up miserably, we wanted stories that reflected how wide and diverse our imaginations were. We didn’t want our identity of being South Asian to stop that, we wanted to embrace it. We wanted characters to sit down over a cup of chai and masala dosa at breakfast time because that was our normal. We wanted to read about the extended family gathering at Eid or Diwali, opening presents, and celebrating their religious traditions, so we could learn from it and understand what really happens.

 These were real discussions that myself and Sara had when we decided to set up our independent publisher. Fox & Windmill launched in 2021 during the second lockdown. We talked to our mentor, Kevin Duffy of Bluemoose Books and he encouraged and guided us. Once we had all the practicalities in place, we set off on the hunt for our first book. In 2022 we published our Into the Wilds, an anthology of short stories and poetry debuting fifteen South Asian writers. Their stories were a reflection of everything that we hoped to achieve. The themes were so varied and that’s what made it more exciting. As there were no specific theme, it was incredible to see how rich and full of life the stories were, but it was clear that the identity of being South Asian came through in full force and being South Asian clearly wasn’t a set-back or a barrier that needed to be overcome, it was used to drive the stories and poetry in a way that made us want to feel very proud of our roots and our heritage. It was a way for the writers to bring two worlds together, from slipping between languages, using food and community to share where we belonged and essentially creating a new place for ourselves. A collision of culture, life, and identity.

The second generation can certainly agree that often we don’t even know where we belong, I’m part of that. The struggle of growing up in a household of kaman dhokla, fish & chips, reading classics and cookbooks by Madhur Jaffrey, there’s a real sense of mixed identity that no-one seems to understand unless you’ve been through it yourself. You can try your hardest to be something that you aren’t, only to realise that you might be denying a part of yourself that is profound and can have an impact. For me, that was how I felt prior to Fox & Windmill, I didn’t understand my culture, community, or identity until I was at university and found that there were no places for people like us in stories unless they were part of a particular narrative. That inspired why we needed to do this, if we were going to remain ignorant of what was happening, then we would be no different to those that publish misleading and lazy stereotypical books would be okay. We had to shift the narrative and needed to create a place for those who had stories to go to and we needed to bridge the gap in the industry.

It was an ambitious and a huge dream that we didn’t think would lead us this far, we were worried what communities would think of us and even what the bigger publishers would think about us. But we were thankful that the welcomes we received in both worlds, reassured that what we were doing was important and much needed. We have had South Asians, both young and older generations tell us that the work we are doing for people like us, is significant and a game-changer. We are shifting the power of publishing from South to the North, we are ensuring there is a place for people just like us, a collision of culture and identity and maybe someday, London might catch up.

Images are from Into the Wilds Book, which is available to order online.

This blog and the associated event was funded by Arts Council England as part of the Rewriting the North series of podcasts, talks, blogs and mentorship scheme.