From Bangladesh to Pakistan, Karachi to say - to another novelist with a long family history of (female) writers: Kamila Shamsie is daughter of Muneeza Shamsie (writer, journalist, critic), niece of Attia Hosain (writer, feminist, broadcaster) and granddaughter of Begum Jahanara Habibullah (writer), just to mention a few. "It was much later that I realised how important it was for me to grow up in a family where the written word mattered so deeply" (K.S. in The Guardian, 1/5/2009). At first Kamila Shamsie, born in Pakistan, didn't recognise her special link as all her relatives are/were writing in Urdu. She, herself, writes in English which seemed a huge difference to her. Additionally, Kamila only started writing, specifically about Karachi, when she moved to America as a student. She wrote her first novel In the City by the Sea while she still attended the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts where she got her MFA after a BA in Creative Writing from Hamilton College. Due to her homesickness she began writing about Karachi however, her books never became travelogues. She covers a broad view on places, writing about lost cricket matches, broken promises and religious confusion while concentrating also on violence and (hidden) political restrictions. As Kamila mentioned at the EdBookFest, there is actually a boom of writing of the experience of political events. Writers in English mainly dare to write more of social problems than writers in Urdu. It's writers in Urdu that face problems with a secret censorship as they reach a wider audience. On the other hand, writers in English reach a more influential and politically intellectual readership.
But Kamila not only writes herself, she has also been a judge for various literary awards, as the Orange Award for New Writers and the Guardian First Book Award. I read her fourth novel Broken Verses and have been very much impressed by the compassion combined with the intelligence of her characters. I savoured particularly her highly articulate use of language - all in all a stunning and impressive novel on love and loss of dear ones and a near physical pain when facing the truth. It seems to me needless to say that she already won several serious literary prizes for her five novels. P.S.: various titles are translated into Dutch, German and Danish.
As I loved her writing, I'll offer you another piece from Broken Verses:
"The joke of it, of course, is that we ourselves become slaves to the stories of our own characters. Our invented narratives of self determine our actions and reactions - I am brave; I am fickle; in such and such a situation I will behave in such and such a fashion. Character is just an invention, but it's an invention that serves as both reason and justification for our behaviour. It is the self-fulfilling prophecy that guides our lives, worming its way so deep beneath the levels of conscious thought that we forget there might have been a time when our 'defining traits' seemed less than inevitable. We are able to look back on our lives and chart our 'development of character', never seeing that it's the development of a storyline, and the longer we live with it the more boxed in we are by the rapidly diminishing variedness of our imagined selves. What we can't ever accept is that we might never know who we are."