Aug 3, 2011
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Tahmima Anam (born 1975) is a Londoner and a Bangladeshi writer and novelist. Her first novel, A Golden Age, was published by John Murray in 2007 and was the Best First Book winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Anam comes from an illustrious literary family in Bangladesh. Her father Mahfuz Anam is the editor and publisher of The Daily Star (Bangladesh), Bangladesh's most prominent English-language newspaper. Her grandfather Abul Mansur Ahmed was a renowned satirist and politician whose works in Bengali remain popular to this day
Anam was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh but she grew up in Paris, New York City, and Bangkok, largely due to her father’s career with the Unicef. After studying for her undergraduate degree at Mount Holyoke College she turned to anthropology earning a PhD from Harvard.
She was inspired to write her first novel (2007) “A Golden Age”, she says, by her parents who were freedom fighters during the Bangladesh Liberation War. For that work, she stayed in Bangladesh for two years and interviewed hundreds of war fighters. She talks here with KGNU’s Claudia Cragg about her second novel ‘A Good Muslim’, the second in what Anam says is now to be a trilogy.