Sumayya Usmani

Sumayya will be cooking at the Fire Pit stage on Sunday 25 August

Sumayya Usmani is a food writer and educator, who grew up in Pakistan, but moved to the UK in 2006. Sumayya quit her City law career to follow her passion for sharing the flavours of her homeland with a view to highlight Pakistani cuisine as a distinct one. The author or two award-winning and award nominated cookbooks: Summers Under The Tamarind Tree (Frances Lincoln 2016) and Mountain Berries and Dessert Spice (Frances Lincoln 2017), her writing reminisces about food and memories growing up in Pakistan and Sumayya advocates cooking by "andaza", (sensory and estimation cooking), which is how she learnt to cook from her mother and grandmothers; from a very young age.

Sumayya has worked with some of the biggest names in the food world, including Madhur Jaffrey, Claudia Roden, Sophie Grigson, Rachel Allen , Nick Nairn and Vivek Singh. She has appeared in many print magazines like Delicious, Olive, BBC Good Food (naming her the go-to expert in Pakistani food), Saveur, New York Times, Food 52, The Telegraph and has also done a residency for four weeks for The Guardian Cook supplement. Sumayya has been on the Good Food Channel (with Madhur Jaffrey), BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour, and Saturday Live, as well as BBC Radio 2, BBC Asian Network and BBC Worldwide. Sumayya also appears on BBC Radio 4's Kitchen Cabinet panel with Jay Rayner.

Sumayya is now settled in Glasgow where she has set up an award-winning social enterprise cookery school called Kaleyard (kaleyard.org) which focuses on teaching people to cook from scratch and helps elevate social isolation through learning to eat food together. She writes a weekly food column in Scotland's Sunday Herald and travels frequently for her food pursuits. Sumayya is presently working on researching her third book.