Zia Haider Rahman

Zia Haider Rahman is a British novelist born in 1969 in Bangladesh, who came to the United Kingdom as a child and was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he read mathematics, and later at Cambridge and Munich. He worked as a mathematician, derivatives trader, and human rights lawyer before becoming a writer. In the Light of What We Know (2014) is his debut novel, a dense, allusive work of ideas exploring mathematics, finance, international law, and the aftermath of the Afghan and Iraq wars through the friendship of two men from very different backgrounds. It won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2014 and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Desmond Elliott Prize, and numerous other awards. The novel draws on Rahman's own remarkable biography — raised in poverty in Bangladesh, scholarship to Oxford — but transforms that material into an expansive meditation on power, knowledge, and the limits of self-knowledge. It is widely considered one of the most ambitious British debut novels of the century.