Kamila Shamsie author page

Kamila Shamsie biography

Kamila Shamsie is a Pakistani-British novelist and essayist. She was born in 1973 in Karachi.

She attended Karachi Grammar School before studying in the United States, earning a BA in Creative Writing from Hamilton College and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Her debut novel, In the City by the Sea, was published in 1998, while she was still at university. It was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and garnered Shamsie the Prime Minister’s Award for Literature in Pakistan in 1999.

Subsequent works include Salt and Saffron (2000), Kartography (2002), Broken Verses (2005) and Burnt Shadows (2009). Burnt Shadows was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

Her novel A God in Every Stone (2014) was shortlisted for the 2015 Walter Scott Prize and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Home Fire (2017) was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award, and won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018.

Shamsie is a Fellow and Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature. She serves as Professor of Creative Writing at the Manchester Centre for New Writing.

Home Fire won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018.