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Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie is a Pakistani novelist who led an itinerant

life for 15 years during the 1990s and 2000s, moving between
Karachi, the United States, and Britain, but has now chosen
London as her main residence. Born in Karachi in 1973, she is
from an elite muhajir family, her mother's relatives being taluq-
dar feudals from Lucknow in India, and the Shamsies belong-
ing to an eminent family of Syeds from Delhi. Her mother is
the well-known Pakistani literary critic, Muneeza Shamsie, and
h er great-aunt was Attia Hosain (1913-98), the author of two
seminal works about vanishing Muslim culture in India and
also Partition. 1 Three generations of her talented, literary family
have been published by Oxford University Press. Kamila's
grandmother, ]ahanara Habibullah, was 84 when her first book,
Remembrance of Days Past appeared; 2 Muneeza is the editor of
the ground-breaking 1990s anthology of anglophone Pakistani
writing, A Dragonfly in the Sun, among other works;3 while h er

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British Muslim Fictions

older sister, Saman, is a children's author; 4 and Kamila herself

distributed two of her novels with the publisher in Pakistan. 5
Shamsie was awarded a BA in Creative Writing from Hamilton
College, before joining the MFA Program for Poets and Writers
at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In the words of
V. S. Naipaul's famous blurb, she has 'followed no other profes-
sion' than writing. 6 At Hamilton College, Kamila was taught by
the late, great Kashmiri poet, Agha Shahid Ali, whom she fol-
lowed to Amherst and describes as 'all laughter and dramatic
utterances', despite the 'increasing virtuosity' of his poetry. 7 She
writes, 'in many of my best moments as a writer I reveal Shahid's
influence on my work'. 8 This influence is particularly evident
in her first novel, In the City by the Sea (1998), the first draft
of which was written as the thesis for her MFA, and in which
Shamsie briefly discusses the issue of nostalgia also explored in
Ali's The Nostalgist's Map of America. 9 The father character, Aba,
traces the etymology of the word 'nostalgia', posing the ques-
tion, 'is nostalgia about return or about standing still and watch-
ing someone else return?' 10 To some extent, Shamsie solves this
riddle in her third novel, Kartography (2002), in which nostalgia is
experienced both by Karim, a Karachiite who moves away from
his city in his teens, and Raheen, a girl who for the most part
stays in the city, but whose view of it is tinged by memories
of the friend who left Karachi. In 'Agha Shahid Ali, Teacher',
Shamsie describes how Ali helped her restructure Kartography
over five years, by 'prod[ding)' her to develop the image of
a spinning globe which she originally wrote for a short story. 11
Her five novels to date have garnered increasing recogni-
tion, with the latest, the epic family novel, Burnt Shadows, being
reviewed especially positively 12 and shortlisted for the Orange
Prize, as well as winning the USA's Anisfield Wolf Award, the
ALOA award in Denmark, the Muslim Writers Award for Pub-
lished Fiction, and Italy's Nord-Sud and Boccaccio Literary
Prizes. In 1999, Shamsie received the Prime Minister's Award
for Literature, and in 2004 and 2006 the Patras Bokhari Award,
both from the Pakistan Academy of Letters. In 2010, she was

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