Kamila Shamsie (born 1973) is a Pakistani novelist who writes in the English language.

She
was brought up in Karachi and attended Karachi Grammar School.
She has a BA in Creative Writing from Hamilton College, and an MFA from the MFA Program
for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she was influenced by
the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali. Shamsie wrote her first novel, In The City by the Sea, while
still at UMass, and it was published in 1998. It was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize
in the UK, and Shamsie received the Prime Minister's Award for Literature in Pakistan in 1999.
Her second novel, Salt and Saffron, followed in 2000, after which she was selected as one of
Orange's 21 Writers of the 21st century. Her third novel, Kartography, received widespread
critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys award in the UK. Both
Kartography and her next novel, Broken Verses, have won the Patras Bokhari Award from the
Academy of Letters in Pakistan. Her fifth novel Burnt Shadows was shortlisted for the Orange
Prize for Fiction. Her books have been translated in a number of languages.
She is also a reviewer and columnist primarily for The Guardian and has been a judge for
several literary awards, including the Orange Award for New Writers and the Guardian First
Book Award.
She is the daughter of the famous literary journalist, compiler and editor Muneeza Shamsie,
niece of Attia Hosain and granddaughter of the writer Begum Jahanara Habibullah. Her sister
Saman Shamsie used to be a college counselor and taught O-level Physics and SAT writing and
reading at Karachi Grammar School.
In 2009, Kamila Shamsie donated the short story "The Desert Torso" to Oxfam's Ox-Tales
project four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the Air
collection.[1]
She participated in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty Six, with a piece based on a chapter of
the King James Bible[2]
In 2013 she was included in the Granta list of 20 best young writers
Review

Unfolding in four sections, the novel traces the shared histories of two families, from the final
days of the second world war in Japan, and India on the brink of partition in 1947, to Pakistan in
the early 1980s, New York in the aftermath of 11 September and Afghanistan in the wake of the
ensuing US bombing campaign. At its heart is the beautifully drawn Hiroko Tanaka, first seen in
Nagasaki in August 1945 as a young schoolteacher turned munitions factory worker whose artist
father is branded a traitor for his outbursts against the emperor and kamikaze militarism. She
falls in love with a lanky, russet-haired idealist from Berlin, Konrad Weiss, with whom she
shares - along with other key characters - a love of languages. But their romance is curtailed by
the flash of light that renders Konrad a shadow on stone and burns the birds on Hiroko's kimono
into her back, a fusion of "charred silk, seared flesh".

Hiroko finds refuge in Old Delhi, in the twilight of the raj, with her dead fianc's sister Ilse and
her English husband James Burton. Befriended by the unhappy Ilse, Hiroko is more drawn to
Sajjad Ali Ashraf, a dashing Muslim employee who agrees to teach her Urdu. Her hosts
discourage their romance ("His world is so alien to yours"), even misinterpreting a moment of
tenderness as one of predation by Sajjad. Yet the couple grow closer as partition sunders Sajjad
from Delhi as shockingly as Nagasaki was lost to Hiroko.
In Karachi, the saga of the Weiss-Burtons and Tanaka-Ashrafs shifts to Hiroko and Sajjad's son
Raza, a linguist given to impersonating Afghan refugees from the Soviet invasion of 1979, and
James and Ilse's son Henry, a Kipling-like figure mourning a lost Indian childhood (his daughter
is named Kim). As Harry Burton, Henry has transferred his idealistic allegiance to his adoptive
US, becoming a covert CIA operative in cold-war Pakistan. Raza's naive bid for a kind of gap
year in Afghanistan's training camps with his Afghan friend Abdullah brings adventures with
gunrunners and poppy growers, but also sobering loss for the family and enduring guilt for Raza.
After Hiroko decamps to New York, disgusted by nuclear posturing between India and Pakistan,
and encounters Abdullah as a taxi driver, the final section alternates between an apartment she
shares with Kim, overlooking the smouldering fires of Ground Zero, and Afghanistan, where
Harry and his interpreter Raza have joined forces in a private security firm. CIA backing for the
mujahideen's resistance war, and abandonment of them once the Soviet army withdrew, is seen
as a grim policy failure whose legacy is being reaped in "Jihadi blowback". But pivotal to the
novel's final betrayals, guilt and loss is a conversation fraught with suspicion and
misunderstanding between Kim and Abdullah. As Abdullah says in exasperation, "everyone just
wants to tell you what they know about Islam, how they know so much more than you do, what
do you know, you've just been a Muslim all your life".

Critical appreciation
Through its succession of seemingly disparate, acutely observed worlds, Burnt Shadows reveals
the impact of shared histories, hinting at larger tragedies through individual loss. The two
families, while watching each other's back, can also prove instrumental in each other's
destruction. There are minor flaws in plotting, and occasional excesses - gorilla suits as modes of
escape, or soft toys sentimentalised as road kill to make a point. But the subtlety lies in repeated
patterns of allegiance and estrangement, betrayal and atonement, in the echoes between
kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers, or between Ilse's alacrity in branding Sajjad as a rapist in
the novel's Forsterian vignette and Kim's suspicion of Muslims after 9/11.
The final section's title, "The Speed Necessary to Replace Loss", is taken from The English
Patient, a guiding spirit, though this novel begins where Michael Ondaatje's ends, with a
mushroom cloud over Asia. Anita Desai's influence is also palpable, in a pre-partition Old Delhi
steeped in Urdu poetry. Yet Shamsie's voice is clear and compelling, with a welcome spareness,
free of the sometimes cloying archness of earlier books.

The historical threads between Nagasaki and Guantnamo are implicit, though crucial. The
atomic age marked the start of the cold war, fought hot in proxy wars from Vietnam to
Afghanistan, with blood spilt by the superpowers' hi-tech weaponry. As Abdullah says bitterly,
"My brother died winning their Cold War." In Hiroko's view, all it takes to wipe people out
without scruple is to "put them in a little corner of the big picture" - whatever the "war" in the
frame. A similar logic informs a chilling conversation about interrogation techniques. "What
wouldn't I do if I thought it was effective?" Harry muses. "Almost nothing. Children are out of
bounds. Rape is out of bounds. But otherwise ... what works, works." Tellingly, he asks not to be
quoted to his daughter.
The identity of the Guantnamo captive remains unclear till the powerful denouement, as events
unfold with a malign logic whereby even a man's stooping for a cricket ball can be fatally
misconstrued. Any reader anticipating a predictable yarn about the radicalisation of Islamist
youth may feel cheated. Far more, I suspect, will feel challenged and enlightened, possibly
provoked, and undoubtedly enriched