Kamila Shamsie

Shamsie was born into a well-to-do family of intellectuals in Karachi, Pakistan. Her mother is journalist and editor Muneeza Shamsie, her great-aunt was writer Attia Hosain and she is the granddaughter of memoirist Jahanara Habibullah.[5][6]

Shamsie was brought up in Karachi, where she attended Karachi Grammar School.[2] She went to the US as a college exchange student,[7] and earned a BA in creative writing from Hamilton College,[2] and an MFA from the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst,[2] where she was influenced by the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali.[8]

Shamsie wrote her first novel, In The City by the Sea, while still in college, and it was published in 1998 when she was 25.[9] It was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in the UK,[10] and Shamsie received the Prime Minister's Award for Literature in Pakistan in 1999.[8] Her second novel, Salt and Saffron, followed in 2000, after which she was selected as one of Orange's 21 Writers of the 21st century.[8] Her third novel, Kartography (2002), received widespread critical acclaim and was also shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in the UK.[10] According to the review in Publishers Weekly: "Shamsie's cerebral, playful style sets her apart from most of her fellow subcontinental writers. Something of a cross between Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie, she deserves a larger readership in the U.S."[11] Both Kartography and Shamsie's next novel, Broken Verses (2005), have won the Patras Bokhari Award from the Academy of Letters in Pakistan.[8]

Shamsie's fifth novel, Burnt Shadows (2009), was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction[10] and won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction.[12] A God in Every Stone (2014) was shortlisted for the 2015 Walter Scott Prize[13] and for the Baileys Women's Prize For Fiction.[14] According to Maya Jaggi's review in The Guardian: "Through its succession of seemingly disparate, acutely observed worlds, Burnt Shadows reveals the impact of shared histories, hinting at larger tragedies through individual loss."[15] Shamsie's seventh novel, Home Fire, described by the BBC as a "powerful story of the complexities of love, family and state in wartime",[16] was longlisted for the 2017 Booker Prize,[17] shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award,[18][19] and in 2018 won the Women's Prize for Fiction.[20][21]

She is also the author of the non-fiction work Offence: The Muslim Case (Seagull Books, 2009).[22] In 2009, Shamsie donated the short story "The Desert Torso" to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project – four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the Air collection.[23] She attended the 2011 Jaipur Literature Festival, where she spoke about her style of writing. She participated in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty-Six Books, with a piece based on a book of the King James Bible.[24]

Shamsie was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2011.[10][25] In 2013, she was included in the Granta list of 20 best young British writers.[26]

She has contributed to such international events as the Cleveland Humanities Festival[7] and the NGC Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad, in 2016,[27][28] and she is a patron of the Manchester Literature Festival.[29] In 2017, she joined the Manchester Centre for New Writing, where she is Professor of Creative Writing.[30]

She delivered the 2018 Orwell Lecture at University College London, with the title "Unbecoming British: citizenship, migration and the transformation of rights into privileges".[31]

In 2021, Shamsie was a judge for the Goldsmiths Prize, alongside Nell Stevens, Fred D'Aguiar and Johanna Thomas-Corr.[32]

Shamsie states that she considers herself Muslim.[33] She moved to London in 2007 and is now a dual national of the UK and Pakistan.[1]

In 2012, she joined the latest incarnation of the Authors XI cricket team, despite never having played the game before. She contributed a chapter, "The Women's XI", to the book The Authors XI: A Season of English Cricket from Hackney to Hambledon (2013), collectively written by members of the team to chronicle their first season together.[34]

• 1999: Prime Minister's Award for Literature in Pakistan, for In the City by the Sea
• 2002: Patras Bokhari Award from the Academy of Letters in Pakistan, for Patras Bokhari Award from the Academy of Letters in Pakistan
• 2005: Patras Bokhari Award, for Broken Verses
• 2010: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, for Burnt Shadows[12]
• 2013: Recognized as one of the BBC's 100 women.[35]
• 2013: Named on Granta's list of 20 best young British writers
• 2018: Women's Prize for Fiction, for Home Fire[36]
• 2019: Nelly Sachs Prize (rescinded, no new winner nominated), in honour of her literary work; however, the jury withdrew its decision to award the writer citing her support for the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.[37][38] A letter protesting the move was signed by hundreds of fellow writers in support of Shamsie.[39]

• In the City by the Sea (1998), ISBN 0-14-028181-9
• Salt and Saffron (2000), ISBN 1-58234-261-X, OCLC 968548654
• Kartography (2002), ISBN 0-15-602973-1
• Broken Verses (2005), ISBN 0-15-603053-5
• Offence: The Muslim Case (2009), ISBN 1-906497-03-6, OCLC 232980963
• Burnt Shadows (2009), ISBN 0-312-55187-8
• A God in Every Stone (2014), ISBN 978-1-4088-4720-6, OCLC 939530755
• Home Fire (2017), ISBN 978-1-4088-8677-9
• Best of Friends (2022), ISBN 9781526647696
• Duckling: A Fairy Tale Revolution (2020), ISBN 9781784876319

• List of people who support the BDS movement

• Yaqin, Amina (May 2021). "Necropolitical Trauma in Kamila Shamsie's Fiction". The Muslim World. 111 (2): 234–249. doi:10.1111/muwo.12383.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Kamila Shamsie.

Wikiquote has quotations related to Kamila Shamsie.

• Kamila Shamsie talks about Burnt Shadows on the BBC's World Book Club
• Kamila Shamsie at Bloomsbury Publishing
• Article in The Guardian on Kamila Shamsie
• "The Storytellers of Empire" in Guernica, 1 February 2012
• Article on the London of Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire on the London Fictions website
• "Kamila Shamsie: Home Fire". Shamsien conversation with Sonia Nair at the Wheeler Centre.
• "Books by Kamila Shamsie and Complete Book Reviews", Publishers Weekly.
• Alison Flood, "Hundreds of authors protest after Kamila Shamsie's book award is revoked", The Guardian, 23 September 2019.