Fatima Bhutto

Fatima Bhutto (born 1982) is a Pakistani writer and columnist, born in Kabul during her father Murtaza Bhutto's exile and raised in Syria and Karachi. Educated at Barnard College and SOAS in London, she published a poetry collection at fifteen, the family memoir Songs of Blood and Sword (2010), and the novels The Shadow of the Crescent Moon (2013) and The Runaways (2019). She is an outspoken critic of her aunt Benazir Bhutto and of dynastic politics, and belongs to no political party. ¹

Bhutto was born in Kabul on 29 May 1982, to Murtaza Bhutto and his Afghan wife Fauzia Fasihudin Bhutto, while her father was in exile under the military regime of General Zia-ul-Haq. ^{1 2 3} Her parents divorced when she was three; her father raised her as they moved from country to country — she grew up effectively stateless — and in 1989, in Syria, he married the Lebanese ballet teacher Ghinwa Bhutto, whom Fatima Bhutto considers her real mother. ¹ Her father was killed by police in Karachi in 1996, during her aunt Benazir Bhutto's premiership; she lives with her stepmother in Old Clifton, Karachi. ¹ She was educated at the Karachi American School, took her bachelor's degree summa cum laude in Middle Eastern and Asian languages and cultures at Barnard College in 2004, and a master's in South Asian Studies at SOAS, University of London in 2005. ¹ Speaking of The Runaways in 2020, she described in her own words how people reacted on hearing "that I'm Muslim", and spoke of Muslims as "more than a billion of us"; the museum records no school or order for her, and her family's background is not used as evidence of her own faith. ⁴

Her first book, the poetry collection Whispers of the Desert, appeared in 1998, when she was fifteen; 8.50 a.m. 8 October 2005 (2006) records accounts of the Kashmir earthquake. ¹ Songs of Blood and Sword (2010), her memoir of her family, accuses her aunt Benazir Bhutto and Asif Ali Zardari of involvement in her father's murder, and drew mixed to negative reviews for its partiality, with several family members accusing her of falsifying information. ¹ Her first novel, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon (2013), was longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction; The Runaways (2019) follows three young Muslim men drawn toward radicalisation, and New Kings of the World (2019) reports on Bollywood, Turkish dizi and K-Pop. ¹ She writes columns for publications including The News and The Guardian. ¹ Although she is politically active, she is affiliated with no party, and has said she rules out a political career entirely because of the effect of dynasties on Pakistan. ¹

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