Talk with Shandana Minhas author of Tunnel Vision

Why would I sell to western readers? My loyalty is to the story. As a storyteller you don’t choose the story, the story chooses you.

Searching for Qurratulain Hyder in a Delhi Kabristan

I was looking for a grave. In the next hill perhaps? For Qurratulain Hyder. She was an Urdu writer who died on August 21.

A tribute: To Revathy Gopal

We talked just once on the phone
I, the hopeful poet,
you, established and acknowledged,
friendly, kind and encouraging.

A Writer's People and earlier works of V.S. Naipaul

Naipaul was once a penetrating and unpredictable literary critic, but here criticism has been reduced to a series of spikey provocations.

Qurat-ul-ain Haider Has Passed Away

An obituary of a distinguished writer of Urdu literature.

Stephen Gill on his Writing and Diaspora

Multiple award-winning author Stephen Gill was born in Pakistan, grew in India and has settled in Canada after staying in Ethiopia and England for a while.

Writers Writers Everywhere, Not A Teenager Around?

We are supposed to be acting adults, showing our worth to not only our country, but also to the world.

Happy Days are Here Again

Who hasn’t experienced rejection? I know I have. There was that guy in class six who didn’t understand the signals I was sending him (I really should have waited for him to hit puberty first). There was that editor at the biggest daily in Kara

Suffering from Writer’s Block.

Husain Haqqani calls for Pakistan’s Acceptance of Global Realities

From the interview with the author of Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

Yehoshua Opens His Heart

His eleventh book, Open Heart, was set in India. Before you ask, ‘What’s so great about that? Several authors, including E M Forster, John Masters, M M Kye and Dominique Lapierre, have used the subcontinent for their plot,’ please realis

“Dasht-e-Tanhai” wins a Prize for Nadeem Aslam

His is a story of Pakistani conservatism in a liberated ambience of England, a story of a civilization clash within a family of blended values of liberalism and orthodoxy. “Eimaan mujhe rokay hai, tau khainchay haiy mujhe kufr” (Faith is compe

Arey Larkay!

“Arey Larkay, go to the fourth room, third shelf from the right and fourth from the top, bring me the seventh book from the right.”

Two Score and Ten

Books that have somehow changed my life...

Bharati Mukherjee : The American Dreamer

‘The experience of cutting myself off from a biological homeland and settling in an adopted homeland that is not always welcoming to its dark-complexioned citizens has tested me as a person but it has made me the writer I am today.’

Ranchor Line ka Firangi

In Ranchor Line at night there is a kind of numb darkness that enshrouds the streets. On every corner and footpaths, scores of men sit and discuss life and shrills of laughter or the disquiet of loud words is heard almost incessantly.

Culture Wars

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim is Mamdani’s most recent work. Inspired largely by the post Sept 11 scenario in the US, this book is one of the few important counter-narratives to the contemporary Western political analysis of Islam.

Bulleh Shah

A man, whose writings - barely understood, even by those who speak his language - contain, amongst them, such enlightening and powerful Sufianic philosophies that even Smith, Voltaire, Rosseau, Kant et. al. would have been proud to claim them, as their ow

Maniza Naqvi: Writing for a Cause

'Look at what the US journalists did to Pakistan over the last three years, portraying the people as though there is something genetically and religiously wrong with us,' she says.

V. S. Naipaul

I know one thing for sure: If Naipaul’s not in conflict with himself, he wouldn’t be in conflict with the society around him. As long as he is not at peace with himself, it is not possible for him to be at peace with others.

A Pakistani Woman’s Voice

'I have decided to dedicate my writing to women,' says Tahira Naqvi very determinedly. Ms Naqvi is an acclaimed fiction writer, translator and professor who considers herself to be a ’feminist’ although she finds the word itself to be quite li

Mapping Karachi’s Charms and Contradictions

Kamila Shamsie spoke about ‘spider-plants’, the literary scene in Pakistan, an absence of ‘stone throwing fundamentalists’ in her work and inevitably about Karachi.

Waiting For Fatwa

Do not be distracted by those who would deflect and criticize her lifestyle. Be fair, think and judge her on what she has written.

A Conversation with Hanif Kureishi

A frank dialogue with the London-based writer