Aamina Ahmad

Aamina Ahmad grew up in London in a Pakistani family and wrote for the stage first: her play The Dishonoured was staged in 2016, took a ScreenCraft award and drew an Offies nomination in 2019. Her story The Red One Who Rocks, published in One Story, won a Pushcart Prize. After a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford she taught in California, and she now teaches as an assistant professor of English at Minnesota. The Return of Faraz Ali, her first novel, appeared from Riverhead in 2022. It opens in Lahore in 1968, where a police inspector is ordered back into the old-city quarter of his birth and told to make an inquiry into a girl's death go away. His father had had him taken out of the quarter at five, to be raised away from his mother, a courtesan there. The plot widens across Ayub Khan's rule, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's rise and the 1971 war that made Bangladesh. It won the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction at the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and the best first novel award of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain.