Aamer Hussein (born: 8 April 1955, Karachi)[1] is a Pakistani short story writer and critic.
Contents |
He grew up in Karachi[1], where he attended Lady Jennings School and the Convent of Jesus and Mary. He spent most summers with his mother's family in India. He studied in Ootacamund, South India, for two years before moving to London in 1970. Hussein is fluent in seven languages: English, Urdu, Hindi, French, Italian, Spanish and Persian.
He read Persian, Urdu and History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and later taught Urdu for many years at the SOAS Language Centre. He has since lectured in the English Department at Queen Mary, University of London, and is currently Director of the MA programme in National and International Literatures at the School of Advanced Study's Institute of English Studies (Senate House). He has also held writing fellowships at the University of Southampton and at Imperial College London, and served as a judge for the Commonwealth Prize (2007) and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (2002).
Some of his earliest stories, such 'The Colour of a Loved Person's Eyes', 'Little Tales', 'Your Children' and 'Karima' appeared in journals and anthologies in the late eighties and early nineties. His first collection of stories, Mirror to the Sun, was published in 1993. Since then, to increasing critical acclaim from contemporaries such as Shena Mackay, William Palmer, Mary Flanagan, Amit Chaudhuri and Tabish Khair, he has published four further collections - This Other Salt (1999), Turquoise (2002), Cactus Town (2003), and Insomnia (2007) - as well as the novella, Another Gulmohar Tree (2009). He has also edited a volume of stories by Pakistani women, Kahani (2005) which includes his own translations from the Urdu of Altaf Fatima, Khalida Hussain and Hijab Imtiaz Ali. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004. His reviews have appeared in the Literary Review, TLS, New Statesman and are now regularly seen on the book pages of The Independent. He has also written essays on Urdu literature for The Annual of Urdu Studies and Moving Worlds. A new work of fiction, provisionally titled Gulmohar, is scheduled for publication in 2009. He lives in Little Venice, London, and spends most winter vacations in Asia.