Jasbinder Bilan: Heading ‘home’ to India freed my creativity

The children’s author grew up in the Midlands, but the tastes, sounds and smells of her family’s Punjab homeland were the inspiration for her stories

My family left India when I was 18 months old, enticed by the opportunities on offer in the UK in the 1960s. We settled in Nottingham where my father, along with my uncles, took work in the foundries of the Midlands.