I spent a lot of time trying to deny where I was from. To this day, mostly for ease, I sometimes tell people I’m “from Leeds”. I’m not from Leeds. I am from Bingley, a small market town about 10 minutes drive from Bradford, West Yorkshire. Bingley is notable for the thermal underwear manufacturer Damart, the Five Rise Locks and Girls Aloud’s Kimberley Walsh.

But in the mid 90s, the region was also famous for race riots. I was a pre-teen and, of course, the talk of predominantly white Bingley was overwhelmingly negative towards the Pakistani community of the Manningham area of Bradford, who had taken to the streets in clashes with the police. I and some school friends started to question the racist messages we’d been fed our entire lives.

The attitude I’d grown up around was, at best, one of suspicion, and at worst outright racism. As the riots tore through Bradford I failed to accept that all Pakistani youths were feral, violent rioters. Not least because there was a handful of Pakistani students at our suburban school who seemed increasingly vulnerable.

Rioting flared up again in 2001, when I was 16. It started when the then home secretary David Blunkett banned the National Front from marching through Bradford. The far right group congregated in a pub and an Asian youth was stabbed to death. From this flashpoint, the deeply segregated white and Pakistani areas of the city clashed in riots that saw 300 police officers injured.

What young, queer, liberal person would want to associate themselves with white supremacy? I went to great lengths at university to distance myself from the shame of these events, hence “I’m from Leeds”.

But then I grew up and moved to Brighton, then London, and then Brighton again. I have lived in the south east since 2003. I have learned there is, as I think any northerner will tell you, a fundamental difference between us and southerners. We possess a certain realism, a wry pessimism you don’t get down south. Perhaps it’s because, living so far from London, we recognise the opportunities and advantages we miss out on simply because we weren’t born within the commuter belt. If you think the government invests in the north as it does the south, you’re dreaming.

But my roots set me in good stead for life as an author. Publishing is so posh, so white and so ridiculous – advances and book deals whipped out of thin air, based on nothing more than hopes and crossed fingers – that my scepticism has served me well. And that’s because I’ll always be from Bingley.