Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie (born 1973) is a Pakistani-British novelist born in Karachi into a family of writers — her mother is the journalist and editor Muneeza Shamsie and her great-aunt was the writer Attia Hosain. ¹ Educated at Karachi Grammar School, Hamilton College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she has published eight novels from In the City by the Sea (1998) to Best of Friends (2022); Home Fire (2017) won the Women's Prize for Fiction. ¹ She moved to London in 2007 and holds dual Pakistani and British nationality. ¹

Shamsie was born in Karachi on 13 August 1973; the Arabic article gives her birth name as Kamila Nahid Shamsie. ^{1 2} She was brought up in Karachi, attended Karachi Grammar School, and went to the United States, where she earned a BA in creative writing from Hamilton College and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali influenced her. ¹ She wrote her first novel while still at college. ¹ She moved to London in 2007 and is a dual national of Pakistan and the United Kingdom, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; Granta named her among its twenty best young British novelists. ¹ Shamsie has stated that she considers herself a Muslim — the Evening Standard profiled her in 2017 on what it is to be a Muslim today — and the museum records no school or order for her. ^{3 1}

Her novels are In the City by the Sea (1998), Salt and Saffron (2000), Kartography (2002), Broken Verses (2005), Burnt Shadows (2009), A God in Every Stone (2014), Home Fire (2017) and Best of Friends (2022). ¹ Burnt Shadows, which moves from Nagasaki in 1945 through Partition to post-2001 Afghanistan, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction; Home Fire, a reworking of Antigone around a British Muslim family drawn into the orbit of the Islamic State, won the Women's Prize for Fiction. ¹ Her non-fiction book Offence — The Muslim Case appeared in 2009. ¹ She also writes for The Guardian, the New Statesman, Index on Censorship and Prospect, and contributed a piece on the book of Philemon to the Bush Theatre's Sixty-Six Books project in 2011. ¹

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