Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie was born on 13 August 1973 in Karachi, Pakistan, into a family of intellectuals—her mother is journalist Muneeza Shamsie and her great-aunt was writer Attia Hosain. She attended Karachi Grammar School before studying in the US, earning a BA from Hamilton College and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She moved to London in 2007 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Creative Writing at the Manchester Centre for New Writing. Shamsie's debut novel In the City by the Sea (1998) was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and won Pakistan's Prime Minister's Award for Literature. Her novel Burnt Shadows (2009) won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Home Fire (2017), a retelling of Sophocles's Antigone set against the backdrop of the Islamic State, won the Women's Prize for Fiction 2018. Named one of Granta's 20 best young British novelists in 2013, she is one of the most important contemporary Pakistani-British voices in fiction.