Our ambassadors are high profile individuals who believe in our work and are committed to helping everyone strengthen their relationships.
Roopa Farooki
Roopa Farooki is the author of The Flying Man, longlisted for the Orange Prize 2012 and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2013. Her previous four novels, Bitter Sweets, Corner Shop, The Way Things Look To Me and Half Life, have been shortlisted for the Orange Award for New Writers and for the Muslim Writers' Awards, and also longlisted for the Orange Prize and Impac Dublic Literary Award.
Her novels have been published in the US, and in translation in 13 countries. She is the recipient of an Arts Council Award, and the John C Laurence Award from the Authors' Foundation in the UK. Roopa's sixth novel will be coming out in May 2014, and she lives with her husband and four children in SE England, and in SW France.
Roopa has written about her positive experiences with Relate in the national press, and her fiction has dealt with themes of marital breakdown, intergenerational relations, parent/child relationships, sibling rivalries, autism in the family, bereavement and the aging process. She has been Relate's Ambassador for Family Counselling since 2008.
Andrew Selous MP
Andrew was born in 1962 and married Harriet in 1993. They have three girls and live in the South West Bedfordshire constituency in Studham near Whipsnade Zoo.
Andrew qualified as a chartered insurer and worked as a reinsurance underwriter before being elected to Parliament. His firm helped many of the world’s poorest communities recover from natural disasters.
He is Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Justice, Chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Sustainable Relationships and an Officer of the APPGs for Fatherhood and Human Trafficking. Andrew became a Relate Ambassador in early 2014.