Reading and Discussion: 'True Stories and other Tales'

Join us in the Bowland Auditorium for an evening event of readings and conversation with Aamer Hussein. The author will read from his fiction, discuss his work, and his contributions to the new issue of the literary journal, Duniyazad.  The conversation will be moderated by Claire Chambers.

Aamer Hussein was born in Karachi, where he lived until 1968.  He moved to London, aged fifteen, in 1970. He graduated with a degree in Persian, Urdu and History from SOAS in 1980.  Aamer’s stories began to appear in journals and anthologies in the late eighties.  His first collection, Mirror to the Sun (1993), was published to acclaim from fellow writers such as Hanan Al-Shaykh, Amit Chaudhuri and Shena Mackay, and he was awarded a writing grant for his second book from the Society of Authors in 1994.

Aamer has since written several critically acclaimed works: three collections of stories, This Other Salt, Turquoise, andInsomnia, a novella, Another Gulmohar Tree (nominated for a Commonwealth regional prize), and a novel, The Cloud Messenger.  His stories have been widely anthologised and have appeared in the Critical Quarterly, New Statesman, Granta,Moth, Traffika and others.  His fiction has been translated into Italian, French, Arabic, Spanish, Japanese and Urdu among other languages.

In 2004, Aamer was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature for his achievement in the genre of the short story.  Also a critic, he is Professorial Writing Fellow in the department of English of Southampton University, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute of English Studies (London University).  He has been on the jury of the Commonwealth Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Impac Prize, and the VS Pritchett Prize for the Short Story.

Aamer is currently completing two collections of stories for publication next year; Maya aur Hans in Urdu and The Man from Beni Mora in English.