Sarah Oliver - Zayn--A New Direction: The Unauthorised Biography

Z ayn Malik is from East Bowling in Bradford and he was born on 12 January 1993 at St Lukes Hospital. His parents, Yaser and Trisha Malik, were so excited when he was born he was their first son and a great playmate for little Doniya, who was one at the time. Zayns wider family were really happy, too.

In Arabic, the name Zayn means beautiful and Malik, his surname, means king or chieftain. Yaser and Trisha gave him the middle name Javadd, which means generous in Arabic. They spelt his first name Zain and when Zayn was on TheX Factor he was referred to as Zain but he prefers it to be spelt Zayn, so after the show he made sure that he would be known that way from then on.

When Zayn was growing up he was always full of energy. He loved being the centre of attention and he liked to sing and dance. His parents had two more children after Zayn: Waliyha and Safaa. Waliyha is six years younger and Safaa is ten years Zayns junior, but the family are all still very close. Zayn has said the one thing thats guaranteed to make him smile is talking to his little sister Safaa.

Zayn would put on shows for his parents and as he grew up, he kept on performing for them, along with his sisters. He would do his own versions of Daniel Bedingfield tracks like If Youre Not The One and dreamed of performing on stage. His mum admitted to the Mirror in April 2012: I have quite a few videos of him singing as a little boy but hes banned me from showing anyone. My favourite is him singing I Believe I Can Fly [By R. Kelly] wearing a green dressing gown.

Zayn is close to his dad, who looked after him before he went to school. He was very hyperactive so Yaser had his hands full! Both Zayn and his dad love drawing and art. In fact when 1D were being interviewed for You Generation in March 2013, Zayn was challenged to draw a picture of his favourite member of the band in one minute. He chose Louis and the sketch he did was really good. In the same interview Niall did a brilliant impression of Zayn. The interview is available on YouTube.

Growing up, Zayn loved spending time with his familys pets, and he still is a huge animal lover. They had two cats called Lily and Lolo and a Staffordshire bull terrier called Tyson. The Malik family now have two cats called Rolo and Tom and a dog named Boris.

Even though Zayn didnt go to nursery he was still really excited about starting primary school. He liked playing in the sand with the other children and listening to his teacher read stories to the class. Though small for his age, he was very intelligent. By the time he was in junior school he could read difficult books that even teenagers might have struggled with.

Back home, he practised reading a lot with his grandfather, who encouraged him to push himself. But school wasnt always a happy place for Zayn. Often he felt like the odd one out because there were no other children like him. No one else was of mixed heritage (Zayns dad is British Pakistani and his mum is half Irish and half English) and the other children would ask him why his dad was brown and his mum was white. This made him feel rather isolated, but thankfully he had his sisters to turn to. Zayn only stayed at his first primary school for two years before moving to another one, where he was much happier. He met his best friend Sam at Lower Fields Primary School and they had lots of fun together until they moved schools and drifted apart.

At school and then later at college Zayns nickname was Z (pronounced Zed).

Zayn ended up going to lots of different educational establishments, for a whole host of different reasons. He admitted to Sugar magazine in March 2013: I got expelled from a couple of schools for fighting.

Where Im from, you kind of had to get into a couple of scrapes to survive.

While at Tong High School, Zayn was caught with a BB gun and got into lots of trouble. He hadnt fired it at anyone but that didnt matter, his teachers still had to punish him for having an imitation firearm. Whenever he started at a new school he would get lots of attention from girls, who wanted to know everything about him because he was new, which made Zayn feel cool. He liked getting extra attention.

Zayn has always loved singing and one of his earliest gigs was while he was a pupil at Lower Fields Primary School and he sang in a choir for the Lord Mayor at his local supermarket. At Tong High School Zayn combined singing with acting when he played the lead in their production of Bugsy Malone. He didnt get nervous, although he sang in front of 400 people in the audience. Zayn also appeared in the schools production of The Arabian Nights and had a part created for him in the musical Grease. He wasnt old enough to be a T-Bird so his teacher created a young T-Bird part for him and for his friend, Aqib Khan.

Today, Aqib Khan is a professional actor and he played Sajid Khan in the 2010 film West Is West and Rashid Jarwar in the ITV series The Jury II. If you search on YouTube, you can see a short clip of Zayn and Aqib in Grease they both look really young.

At Tong High, acting was Zayns real passion and singing was his second love. His three favourite subjects at school were English, art and drama. In fact, Zayn was so good at English that he sat his GCSE English exam a year early. Steve Gates, assistant head teacher, told the Telegraph & Argus: Zayn is a model student who excelled in all the performing arts subjects, one of the specialist subjects here at Tong.

He was always a star performer in all the school productions so it was no surprise when Simon Cowell threw him his big chance.

He joined the school choir at the request of another teacher, Mrs Fox, who thought he had a good voice. Around this time he became best friends with a boy called Danny, who was in his drama class and also befriended Dannys younger brother, Anthony. Today, they are still close and chill out whenever Zayn is visiting Bradford. They love playing on the Xbox together and share the same sense of humour. If you google Zayn Malik, Anthony Riach & Danny Riach Dancing you will see a great video of the three of them dancing to an Usher song and they can seriously dance!

One day, when Zayn was at school, he was given the opportunity to sing with British singer-songwriter/rapper Jay Sean. Jay remembers the day well and explained to 2DAY FM in June 2012: About five years ago I happened to be at a school in England and I was doing, like, these talks about music and who wants to be a musician and blah, blah, blah. So anyway, I was on stage singing and then I went out to the crowd and I was like, Are there any aspiring singers over here? and then this little boy puts his hand up and I was like, You, come up here, man! and I was like, Have you ever sung before? and he was like, No, Im really shy, Im really nervous, and I was like, Listen, were going to do this together. Were going to sing one of my songs and were going to do it together, me and you.