Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain reveals life of racial abuse and Islamophobia

The winner of the Great British Bake Off, Nadiya Hussain, said she has received so much racist abuse during her life that she's come to expect it. The mother-of-three, who became an overnight star after winning the BBC cookery show last year, revealed she has been "shoved, pushed and verbally abused" and said it had become "part of her life" as a Muslim in Britain.

Hussain, 31, made the comments in an interview on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs on Sunday, 14 August. She said: "I've had things thrown at me and been pushed and jabbed. It sounds really silly because I feel that it's just become a part of my life now… It's been happening for years."

It comes after Hussain revealed in January how police would come to check on her and her family at their home after being targeted by an anti-Islamic hate mob on social media.

When asked by host Kirsty Young how she reacted to the abuse, Hussain said she refused to retaliate so her young children would grow up "without a chip on their shoulder".

"I feel like there's a dignity in silence, and I think if I retaliate to negativity with negativity, then we've evened out," she said. "And I don't need to even that out because if somebody's being negative, I need to be the better person.

"Because I've got young children, the one thing I don't want my kids to do is have a negative attitude to living in the UK because, yes, there are those negative people, but they are the minority."

She added: "I love being British and I love living here and this is my home and it always will be. Regardless of all the other things that define me, this is my home. And I want my kids to be proud of that, and I don't want my kids to grow up with a chip on their shoulder.

"So I live as positively as I can and all those things that do happen to me, hey, it happens but it happens to other people too and we deal with it."

Hussain, who was born in Luton to Bangladeshi parents, saw her life as a stay-at-home mum transformed after winning the Great British Bake Off last October.

With 15m people watching the show's finale, she has been credited with inspiring a nation to bake and even now has her own cookery book. She has since been named by Debrett's as one of the 500 most influential people in the UK.

When Hussain won the contest, which had prompted even judge Mary Berry to wipe away tears, she said: "I'm never going to put boundaries on myself ever again. I'm never going to say I can't do it. I'm never going to say 'maybe'. I'm never going to say 'I don't think I can'. I can and I will."

She said on Desert Island Discs the words had a powerful effect on some people.

"I remember watching that final back and looking around and everyone around me was blubbering – my family, everyone that was watching it with me, they were all crying. I know when I said those words why I said them. And I remember the following day I went out and I met a lady – and I'll never forget it.

"This lady was with her child, maybe eight or nine months old, and said 'I watched your final and I had been scared to leave the house because I've had my baby and I've been really afraid to leave with the baby, and I watched the final and I've finally left with the baby and this is the first thing I've done outside of the house without anybody.'

"So for me, I'd realised what had happened at that point, and ever since coming off Bake Off, everybody seems to talk about that last bit, and how they felt the same emotions or in some way related to those words."

Hussain's Desert Island Discs choices ranged from Janet Jackson and Luther Vandross's The Best Things In Life Are Free to Pachelbel's Canon In D Major. Her chosen luxury item was Marmite.