Quick Facts
Biography
Early life
Nadeem Aslam moved with his family to the UK aged 14 when his father, a Communist, fled President Zia's regime. The family settled in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. He later studied biochemistry at the University of Manchester, but left in his third year to become a writer.
Career
At 13, Aslam published his first short story in Urdu in a Pakistani newspaper.
His 1993 debut novel, Season of the Rainbirds, set in rural Pakistan, won the Betty Trask and the Author's Club First Novel Award.
His next novel, 2004's Maps for Lost Lovers, is set in the midst of an immigrant Pakistani community in an English town in the north. The novel took him more than a decade to complete, and won the Kiriyama Prize.
Aslam's third novel, The Wasted Vigil, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in September, 2008. It is set in Afghanistan. He traveled to Afghanistan during the writing of the book; but had never visited the country before writing the first draft. On 11 February 2011, it was short-listed for the Warwick Prize for Writing
Aslam's fourth novel is The Blind Man's Garden (2013). It is set in Western Pakistan and Eastern Afghanistan and looks at the War on Terror through the eyes of local, Islamist characters. It contains also a love story loosely based on the traditional Punjabi romance of Heer Ranjha.
He has mentioned Vasko Popa, Ivan V. Lalić, Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, Herman Melville, John Berger, VS Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje, and Bruno Schulz. as the writers that he admires.
His writings have been compared to those by Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Kiran Desai. Aslam received an Encore in 2005. He writes his drafts in longhand and prefers extreme isolation when working.
He is a fellow of Royal Society of Literature
Awards
- For Season of the Rainbirds
- Betty Trask Award 1994
- The Author's Club First Novel Award 1993
- The Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (shortlist) 1994
- The Whitbread First Novel Award (shortlist) 1994
- For Maps for Lost Lovers
- The Encore Award 2005
- The Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize 2005
- British Book Awards Decibel Writer of the Year (shortlist) 2006
- International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (shortlist) 2006
- For The Blind Man's Garden
- DSC Prize for South Asian Literature (shortlist) 2014
- For literary achievement
- 2014 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize (Fiction), valued at $150,000 one of the largest prizes in the world of its kind.