Nadeem Aslam

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Nadeem Aslam (born 1966, Gujranwala, Pakistan) is a prize-winning British Pakistani novelist.

Biography

Aslam was born in Gujranwala, Pakistan and moved with his family to the UK aged 14 when his father, a Communist, fled President Zia's regime. The family settled in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. He later studied biochemistry at the University of Manchester, but left in his third year to become a writer.[1]

He lives in north London.[citation needed]

Writing career

At 13, Aslam published his first short story in Urdu in a Pakistani newspaper.

His debut novel, Season of the Rainbirds (1993), set in rural Pakistan, won the Betty Trask and the Author's Club First Novel Award.

He won widespread praise for his next novel Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) which is set in the midst of an immigrant Pakistani community in an English town in the north. The novel took him more than a decade to complete, and won the Kiriyama Prize.[citation needed]

Aslam's third novel, The Wasted Vigil, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in September, 2008.[2] It is set in Afghanistan. He traveled to Afghanistan during the writing of the book;[3] but had never visited the country before writing the first draft.[4] On 11 February 2011, it was short-listed for the Warwick Prize For Writing [5]

Aslam's fourth novel is The Blind Man's Garden (2013). It is set in Western Pakistan and Eastern Afghanistan and looks at the War on Terror through the eyes of local, Islamist characters. It contains also a tender love story loosely based on the traditional Punjabi romance of Heer Ranjha.[citation needed]

He has mentioned Vasko Popa, Ivan V. Lalić, Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, Herman Melville, John Berger, VS Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje, and Bruno Schulz.[3] as the writers that he admires.

His writings have been compared to those by Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Kiran Desai. Aslam received an Encore in 2005. He writes his drafts in longhand and prefers extreme isolation when working. [6]

Bibliography

  • Season of the Rainbirds (1993)
  • Maps for Lost Lovers (2004)
  • The Wasted Vigil (2008)
  • Leila in the Wilderness (short story) published in Granta 112 (2010)
  • The Blind Man's Garden (2013)

Prizes and awards

References

  1. ↑ British council contemporary writers
  2. ↑ Random House
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Bookbrowse.com
  4. ↑ BBC World Service, The Word, 14 October 2008
  5. ↑
  6. ↑ Rees, Jasper (2004-06-14). "Nadeem Aslam". Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 2009-09-25. 
  7. ↑ Ashlin Mathew (November 22, 2013). "Three Indians in race for DSC prize for South Asian Literature 2014". India Today. Retrieved November 22, 2013. 

External links

Authority control
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