In The City by the Sea

Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie FRSL (born 13 August 1973) is a Pakistani and British writer and novelist who is known for her award-winning novel Home Fire.Shamsie was born into a well-to-do family of intellectuals in Pakistan. Her mother is journalist and editor Muneeza Shamsie, her great-aunt was writer Attia Hosain and she is the granddaughter of memoirist Jahanara Habibullah. She was brought up in Karachi where she attended Karachi Grammar School. She has a BA in Creative Writing from Hamilton College,and an MFA from the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she was influenced by the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali. Shamsie wrote her first novel, In The City by the Sea, while still in college, and it was published in 1998 when she was 25. It was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in the UK, and Shamsie received the Prime Minister's Award for Literature in Pakistan in 1999. Her second novel, Salt and Saffron, followed in 2000, after which she was selected as one of Orange's 21 Writers of the 21st century.[4] Her third novel, Kartography (2002), received widespread critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys award in the UK. Both Kartography and her next novel, Broken Verses (2005), have won the Patras Bokhari Award from the Academy of Letters in Pakistan. Her fifth novel Burnt Shadows (2009) was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction. A God in Every Stone (2014) was shortlisted for the 2015 Walter Scott Prize[8] and the Baileys Women's Prize For Fiction. Her seventh novel, Home Fire, was longlisted for the 2017 Booker Prize,and in 2018 won the Women's Prize for Fiction.