Saba Sams was 22 and the mother of a two-month-old baby when she found out that the publisher Bloomsbury wanted to offer her a book deal. Four years later, in 2022, her first collection of short stories, Send Nudes, was published. It won the BBC National Short Story Award and the Edge Hill short story prize for its standout depiction of young womanhood, reports BritPanorama.
The following year, Sams was named on Granta’s list of the best young British novelists based on that story collection. Last year, her debut novel, Gunk, was published. Exploring themes of maternal longing, young motherhood, and families beyond the nuclear model, the book cemented Sams’ reputation as one of literature’s most compelling new voices.
Among her literary influences, Sams names five novels that have profoundly impacted her as a reader.
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes
“This novel changed me because of how brutal and unflinching it is in the face of its subject: a small Mexican village gasping beneath the combined pressures of misogyny, poverty, violence, and systemic corruption. Reading it is panic-inducing and claustrophobic, but why wouldn’t it be? I find Melchor incredibly brave for bearing witness and for forcing her readers to do so as well.”
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
“Following the lives of a set of twins, Rahel and Estha, and their wider family in 1960s Kerala, this is a beautiful and warm book that fights against what Roy labels the ‘Love Laws’: unwritten social rules that restrict relationships by caste, class, and religion. It insists on love as expansive, even when such expansiveness is dangerous. This insistence, which I encountered first as a teenager, forced me to question my own ideas about love.”
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
“This classifies as both a novel and a collection of interlinked short stories, in which time and characters are constantly shifting as well as tethered to one another. It’s an elegant and funny portrait of contemporary America, of the ways that technology has changed us and will continue to do so. In our times, famed for their isolation, it is easy to feel filled with doom, but these stories present a continuous potential for connection.”
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore
“Here Berie, wandering Paris with her husband, remembers her teenage best friend Sils, with whom she worked at a theme park called Storyland, just below the Canadian border. As a novel, it sounds small and quiet, and it is, but it’s also somehow all-encompassing and giant, because it’s about time and the way we move through it, about the things we can brush off and the things that burrow into us. It’s funny, too, and energizing. It’s life in a book, I think. It changed my life because it made me want to write better.”
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
“This short and grotty novel, set in Paris, begins when David, an American man who is already engaged to a woman, falls for Giovanni, an Italian bartender. It’s a book about internalised homophobia, about self-contempt, about passion, and the question of whether love can ever be enough when society is stacked against you. Reading it, which can be done in a single afternoon, is a singular and transformative experience.”
Saba Sams is longlisted for the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize 2026 for ‘Gunk’, out in paperback on 6 May (Bloomsbury, £9.99)
