Uzma Aslam Khan

Uzma Aslam Khan (born 1969) is a Pakistani novelist, born in Lahore and raised largely in Karachi, with her earliest years spent in Manila, Tokyo and London. Educated at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and the University of Arizona, she is the author of five novels, from The Story of Noble Rot (2001) and Trespassing (2003) to The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali (2019); Thinner Than Skin (2012) won the KLF–Embassy of France Fiction Prize. ¹

Khan was born in Lahore on 19 February 1969 — a date the English article does not give, taken from Wikidata's statement referenced to the German National Library authority file — and was raised largely in Karachi, though her earliest years were spent in Manila, Tokyo and London. ^{2 1} Her parents had migrated to Pakistan as refugees after the partition of India, and she describes her childhood as forcibly uprooted and happily nomadic. ¹ She won a scholarship to Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York, taking a BA in Comparative Literature, and then an MFA at the University of Arizona in Tucson. ^{1 3}

Her first novel, The Story of Noble Rot, was published by Penguin Books India in 2001 and reissued in 2009. ¹ Trespassing (2003), set in the 1990s after the Afghan and Gulf wars and completed a few months before the September 2001 attacks, has been translated into fourteen languages in eighteen countries and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Eurasia region. ¹ The Geometry of God (2008) follows a girl who discovers the fossil ear of an ancient whale and grows up to become a palaeontologist working in Pakistan's mountains. ¹ Thinner Than Skin (2012) was nominated for the Man Asian Literary Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and won the inaugural KLF–Embassy of France Fiction Prize at the Karachi Literature Festival in 2014. ¹ The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali (2019), set in the Andaman Islands before and during the Second World War, reconstructs marginalised lives that official history passes over. ¹

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