Indian origin Times journalist Sathnam Sanghera has been short-listed for the biography prize at the British Costa Book Awards for 2008. He was nominated for his book  ”If You Don’t Know Me By Now: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton”.

The book began as a letter to his mother explaining why he was not ready for an arranged marriage. Sanghera started looking for possible objections from his parents to his decision and that led him to forage his family history from when his parents came to Britain from rural Punjab in India.

Sanghera’s book is one of the four in contention for the award. His rivals are also journalists: Judith Mackrell for her biography of the ballerina Lydia Lopokova, Jackie Wullschlager for her book on the artist Marc Chagall, and Diana Athill - a former publisher who worked for the BBC during World War II - for her fifth volume of the memoir ‘Somewhere Towards the End’.

The Costa Book Awards are considered a prestigious literary prize in Britain. They fall in five categories: first novel, novel, poetry, biography and children’s books. The prize was established in 1971 as Whitbread Book Awards to recognise the ‘most enjoyable’ books by writers based in Britain and Ireland. Since 2006 they are known after their current owners, Costa Coffee.

Sanghera was born in England in 1976 and joined The Financial Times in 1998 after graduating from Cambridge. He joined The Times in 2007.