Zia Haider Rahman

Is a British novelist of Bangladeshi origin. His debut novel In the Light of What We Know was published in 2014 to great acclaim. The influential critic James Wood wrote a 4,000-word review in The New Yorker, summing it up as a "dazzling debut". In the Light of What We Know has been long listed for the Guardian first book award 2014.

Born in rural Bangladesh in the shadow of the 1971 war, Zia moved to London with his family where he flourished academically and gained a place at Oxford University to study mathematics. His success at Oxford led to a host of scholarships and further studies at Munich, Cambridge and Yale Universities. Perhaps inevitably, the world of finance came calling and Zia was headhunted by Goldman Sachs to work as an investment banker on Wall Street. Reportedly unfulfilled by what he had achieved already, he returned to study for the bar and became an international human rights lawyer.