Aamer Hussein

Aamer Hussein was born in Karachi in 1955 and moved to London in 1970 for further education after a year at boarding school in India. He has a degree in Urdu, Persian and South Asian studies from SOAS, and later studied French, philosophy and psychology. He began publishing fiction in the 1980s in journals and anthologies.

His first collection of stories, Mirror to the Sun, appeared in 1993, to be followed by This Other Salt, Turquoise, Cactus Town, and Insomnia. He has also published a novella, Another Gulmohar Tree (2009) and a novel, The Cloud Messenger (2011). His stories have been translated into many languages, including Italian, Arabic and Japanese. In 2012, he contributed four original stories and a memoir in Urdu to the Karachi journal Dunyazad. Hussein, who is also an essayist and critic, is Professorial Writing Fellow in the Department of English and Humanities at the University of Southampton, and a Senior Fellow of the Institute of English Studies at London University.