broken

The Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain, who rose to fame on the 2015 series, has spoken out about her change of career and experiences of working as a teaching assistant

Winner of the Great British Bake Off Nadiya Hussain has spoken out about the television industry and the difficult choice she made to leave her agent and her manager.

Nadiya, 41, who won the Bake Off in 2015, spoke about the industry just days after it was announced that she was leaving her teaching assistant job, as she continues this next phase of her career.

Speaking about the matter, she discussed the “overwhelming whiteness of TV and publishing” and admitted she was tired of working in what she described as a broken industry.

She told the Guardian: “It’s broken. This last year has been really important for me to realise that, really accept that, actually, I can’t fix a broken industry.”

Nadiya also talked about what 2025 was like for her, and how it gave the renowned baker an opportunity to think about the next decade of her life after admitting that she felt like she had “started to feel like a caricature of myself”.

She added: “It has been really enlightening at the same time. I’ve had the opportunity to sit back and look at how I see the next 10 years…It’s been scary, but I’ve also really enjoyed figuring out what that looks like for me.”

Last year Nadiya released a cookbook titled ‘Rooza’, one containing dishes inspired by important elements of the Islamic world and culture, including Eid and Ramadan. She also created another volume titled ‘Nadiya’s Quick Comforts’.

With her decision to take back control of her career has come new freedoms and new locations, with Nadiya announcing earlier this month that she was leaving her teaching assistant job.

However, in a post on Instagram, Nadiya said she was leaving the role because of the negative impact it was having on her health. Nadiya has a weakened immune system and lives with fibromyalgia, a chronic condition that causes musculoskeletal pain and fatigue, among other symptoms.

In the social media post, Nadiya explained why she had to leave a job she had been in for only three months: “I’ve always wanted to work with children in younger years as a teaching assistant and I applied for a few jobs, which in itself was difficult for lots or reasons.

“I applied and got a job as a TA (teaching assistant) at a primary school and I’ve got to say, apart from raising my own children, it was one of the best jobs I’ve ever done.

“I loved every second of waking up in the morning with a spring in my step for these beautiful children. I just loved every second of doing that job.

“But unfortunately doing a job like that as somebody with a weakened immune system it just played havoc with my health…. I was sick all the time and it got to the point where it was affecting my mental health and I just wasn’t performing, giving my best because I was always sick.”

She added: “But unfortunately with a weakened immune system working as a TA in a primary school was just proving impossible and it was one of the hardest decisions I had to make to step away for it.”

Dilling, a key route for supply lines, had under the paramilitary group’s control for nearly two years.

Sudan’s military says it has broken a nearly two-year siege by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on a key town in the Kordofan region, gaining control over major supply lines.

In a statement late on Monday, the military said it had opened a road leading to South Kordofan province’s Dilling town.

“Our forces inflicted heavy losses on the enemy, both personal and equipment,” the statement said.

There was no immediate comment from the RSF, which has been at war with the army for control of Sudan for nearly three years.

Dilling lies halfway between Kadugli – the besieged state capital – and el-Obeid, the capital of neighbouring North Kordofan province, which the RSF has sought to encircle.

Al Jazeera’s Hiba Morgan, reporting from the Sudanese capital Khartoum, described the army’s takeover of Dilling as a “very significant gain” that may lead to more advances in the province.

“The army is trying to make use of this momentum to take territory not just from the RSF, but also from its ally, the SPLM-N, led by Abdel Aziz al-Hilu, which controls territory and has forces in South Kordofan,” Morgan said.

Paramilitary troops were likely to fight back and attempt to retake the lost territory by relocating fighters from el-Obeid and Kadugli, according to Morgan.

Morgan added that the humanitarian situation in Dilling would likely improve as the army will now be able to bring in medical supplies, food and other commercial goods that had been prevented from entering during the RSF’s siege.

After being forced out of Khartoum in March, the RSF has focused on Kordofan and the city of el-Fasher, which was the military’s last stronghold in the sprawling Darfur region until the RSF seized it in October.

Reports of mass killings, rape, abductions and looting emerged after el-Fasher’s paramilitary takeover, and the International Criminal Court launched a formal investigation into “war crimes” by both sides.

Dilling has reportedly experienced severe hunger, but the world’s leading authority on food security, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, did not declare famine there in its November report because of a lack of data.

A United Nations-backed assessment last year already confirmed famine in Kadugli, which has been under RSF siege for more than a year and a half.

More than 65,000 people have fled the Kordofan region since October, according to the latest UN figures.

The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people and created what the UN describes as the world’s largest displacement and hunger crisis. At its peak, the war had displaced about 14 million people, both internally and across borders.