The
first day of the Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF) welcomed a prominent Pakistani
author, Kamila Shamsie.
Kamila Shamsie,
a Karachi-born novelist is the author of six novels including ‘Burnt Shadows’ which was shortlisted for
the Orange prize for fiction. She has been nominated for the DSC South Asian Literature prize 2015 for her book ‘A Godin Every Stone’.
A
wonderful narrative style can be seen in Shamsie’s novels where she writes
about places she’s never been to.
“As a writer, writing about places made sense
to me. I discovered that new places can be very familiar” said Kamila Shamsie
while discussing about geography of places in the narrative text at the SIBF.
Having
born in Karachi where she spent most of her childhood she describes it as one
of the most fascinating cities of the world. She says “It’s a city of dramatic
changes which allows for a love conflict in narration”
Shamsie
believed that Karachi was the only place she would write about. But it was only
when by chance that she discovered she wanted to be a writer who discovered
places through writing about them.
“Then I became in some ways the opposite
kind of writer to whom I’ve been before. I went from being someone who looked
to the world around me and tried to find a way to turn that reality into
imagination to someone who had to imaginatively enter places I didn’t know and
put them into my novels” said Shamsie.
Talking
about her novel ‘Burnt Shadows’ where the story ventures through Pakistan,
Afghanistan, New York, India and Japan in 1940’s, Shamsie said “I’ve never been
to Japan and even if I had there’s no way of going to Nagasaki in 1945. When I
was writing about Japan, I was looking about the temperature in August in
Nagasaki, what flowers were there. And one of the flowers that grew there
plentifully was Azaleas. And I had written many scenes in which the couple is
walking around the Azaleas quite romantically”.
Shamsie
thinks that place is completely central to a novel and a really good novel will
transit in places.
While
advising young writers, Shamsie said that before writing anything, reading is
more important. “Read books you think you aren’t interested in because in the
end you might realize what looks unappealing ends up becoming what you’re most
interested in”.
By: Mariam Nasir
The writer is a first year undergraduate Media & Communication student.
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