Biography of Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie was conceived in 1973 in Pakistan. She is the little girl of the acclaimed writer Muneeza Shamsie, experienced childhood in Karachi, considered in the US, and now lives in London. Her first novel In the City by the Sea was distributed in 1998, while she was still in school and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. In the next year, she was granted the Pakistan Prime Minister's Award for Literature. Shamsie is the creator of seven books. Her epic Burnt Shadows (2009) was converted into in excess of twenty dialects and shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her latest, Home Fire (2017) has been longlisted for the Man Booker prize. 

Kamila Shamsie is a standout amongst the most wonderful storytellers within recent memory. In clear, convincing writing she weaves stories that regularly cross existence, as in Burnt Shadows, where she follows the entwining destiny of two families through the last days of the second World War, to Pakistan during the 1980s, and the consequence of September eleventh, 2001. 

Her first novel, In the City by the Sea, was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and her second, Salt and Saffron, won her a place on Orange's rundown of '21 Writers for the 21st Century'. In 1999 Kamila got the Prime Minister's Award for Literature in Pakistan. Her third novel, Kartography (2004), investigates the stressed connection between perfect partners Karim and Raheen, set against a scenery of ethnic brutality. 

Kamila Shamsie lives in London and Karachi. She has a BA in Creative Writing from Hamilton College in Clinton New York, where she has likewise shown Creative Writing, and a MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She likewise composes for The Guardian, The New Statesman, Index on Censorship and Prospect magazine, and communicates on radio. 

Her most recent books are Broken Verses (2005), and Burnt Shadows (2009), an epic story which was shortlisted for the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction. 

Shamsie was destined to writer and editorial manager Muneeza Shamsie and is granddaughter of Begum Jahanara Habibullah. She was raised in Karachi where she went to Karachi Grammar School. She has a BA in Creative Writing from Hamilton College, and a MFA from the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she was affected by the Kashmiri artist Agha Shahid Ali. In 2007, she moved to London and is presently a double national of the UK and Pakistan 

I ought to have known from the stacked exchange in her books that Kamila Shamsie doesn't have much persistence with casual discussion. As we stroll from the Soho workplaces of her distributer to an offbeat French patisserie, I do the English thing, offering a couple of bits of patter about the capricious March climate. She humors me. Shamsie is about my own age, but I feel like a juvenile ditz adjacent to the develop, cosmopolitan lady in the tan softened cowhide coat. A lady who is obviously trusting I have more to examine with her than the likelihood of rain. 

As we subside into unsteady seats on the uneven asphalt outside Maison Bertaux, I recall that she has gone along with me straight from a BBC Radio Four studio, where she has been talking about legislative issues, religion and her fourth novel, Broken Verses, with Andrew Marr. As we think about the window show of croissants, I ask her how the communicate went. "It was a 'world after 9/11 sort of-thing'," she says.