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Writer in Residence Summer 2012: Kamila Shamsie

Posted on 26 March 2012

This summer term 2012 the John Tilney Writer in Residence in the Department of English will be Kamila Shamsie, an English-language Pakistani novelist.

She is the author of five widely acclaimed novels who Salman Rushdie has called ‘a writer of immense ambition and strength.’

Born in 1973, Kamila was brought up in Karachi and attended Karachi Grammar School. She went on to take a BA in Creative Writing at Hamilton College and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her first novel In The City By The Sea (1998) was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in the UK, and in 1999 she received the Prime Minister's Award for Literature in Pakistan. After her second novel, Salt and Saffron (2000), she was chosen as one of Orange's 21 Writers of the 21st century. Her third novel Kartography (2002) was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys award in the UK and won the Patras Buhari award from the Academy of Letters in Pakistan, as did her fourth, Broken Verses (2005). Her fifth novel Burnt Shadows (2009) was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Anita Desai called it ‘audacious in its ambition, epic in its scope’ and a ‘starling expansion of the author’s intentions, imagination and craftsmanship’. Nadeem Aslam said of it: ‘In this brilliant book Kamila Shamsie opens a vista onto the century we have just lived through – pointing out its terror and its solace. She is so extraordinary a writer that she also offers hints about the century we are living through’.

Kamila is also a reviewer and columnist, mainly for The Guardian, and has been a judge for the Orange Award for New Writing and The Guardian First Book Award. In 2009 she donated the short story ‘The Desert Torso’ to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project and in 2011 she took part in the Bush Theatre's Sixty Six, for which she wrote a piece based on the King James Bible.

While at York, Kamila will be taking a series of weekly creative writing workshops for students of the English Department as well as being available for individual consultations with students in the Department to discuss their creative writing projects. During the course of the Summer Term she will be giving a reading at the Humanities Research Centre open to members of the Department, University and general public.