The good shepard

For someone searching for an identity, author Sadia Shepard seems confoundingly free of internal conflict...

“Writers should be read but neither seen nor heard,” said author Daphne du Maurier, who would be taken aback to see the self-promotion that has come to be essential to the book trade in this day and age, as seen at the recent Karachi Literature Festival . Of the writers presenting their work was rising star Sadia Shepard, presenting her debut The Girl From Foreign, a memoir of her search for her Indian-Jewish grandmother’s roots. Shepard — who grew up in a multicultural household outside Boston — was 13 when she discovered her grandmother’s heritage.

Fascinated by the knowledge that her maternal grandmother had been born Rachel Jacobs in a little-known Jewish community in Mumbai, before ultimately marrying a Muslim and converting to Islam, the grown-up Shepard travels to India to find out more about the life her grandmother left behind. The result of this journey is The Girl From Foreign. Shepard is, at this young age, already quite the Renaissance Woman. By profession she is a documentary filmmaker who has worked on projects for the Discovery Channel.

Her most successful work is the critically-acclaimed documentary The September Issue, a ferociously entertaining account of the production of Vogue magazine’s legendary bumper issue. She started her book in 2003 — breaking off in 2007 for the filming of The Septmber Issue — before publishing it in 2008. When you write a memoir so young, you’re setting yourself up for that thorny question of why anybody would be interested in reading about you in the first place. “I never thought anyone would read my book”, says Shepard, who did not let the disconcerting possibility discourage her from writing it.

Full report here International Herald Tribune

Bringing back joy & pleasure

Last weekend, Pakistan’s rising literary stars and a handful of fiction writers, journalists and poets from India, Bangladesh, UK and the United States gathered to kick off the country’s first literary festival in the pulsing port of Karachi...

In the last ten years, authors of Pakistani English language fiction such as Mohsin Hamid, Nadeem Aslam and Mohammed Hanif have gained increased recognition in the international literary scene, winning accolades and prestigious prizes such as the Betty Trask Award, the Kuriyama Prize and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. But until last weekend, there had never been a forum within Pakistan to discuss and celebrate this phenomenon.

Last weekend, Pakistan’s rising literary stars and a handful of fiction writers, journalists and poets from India, Bangladesh, UK and the United States gathered to kick off the country’s first literary festival in the pulsing port of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and its financial and economic center. Although the festival was announced to the public merely a day before the inaugural event due to security concerns, the festival’s sessions drew an enthusiastic and diverse audience of Karachiites who listened eagerly to authors discussing their work and debating issues such as the role and challenges of contemporary South Asian English Literature.

It was an idea that the festival’s organisers hatched after attending India’s DSC Jaipur Literature Festival in 2009, which British historian William Dalrymple has guided from its beginnings as a small gathering of writers and critics in 2005 to the largest and most prestigious literary event in Asia.


Full report here Deccan Herald

Bringing back joy & pleasure

Last weekend, Pakistan’s rising literary stars and a handful of fiction writers, journalists and poets from India, Bangladesh, UK and the United States gathered to kick off the country’s first literary festival in the pulsing port of Karachi.


In the last ten years, authors of Pakistani English language fiction such as Mohsin Hamid, Nadeem Aslam and Mohammed Hanif have gained increased recognition in the international literary scene, winning accolades and prestigious prizes such as the Betty Trask Award, the Kuriyama Prize and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. But until last weekend, there had never been a forum within Pakistan to discuss and celebrate this phenomenon.

Last weekend, Pakistan’s rising literary stars and a handful of fiction writers, journalists and poets from India, Bangladesh, UK and the United States gathered to kick off the country’s first literary festival in the pulsing port of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and its financial and economic center. Although the festival was announced to the public merely a day before the inaugural event due to security concerns, the festival’s sessions drew an enthusiastic and diverse audience of Karachiites who listened eagerly to authors discussing their work and debating issues such as the role and challenges of contemporary South Asian English Literature.

Full report here Deccan Herald

Karachi Literature Festival concludes

The two-day Karachi Literary Festival, organised by the British Council and the Oxford University Press (Pakistan) ended Sunday with a host of literary and cultural activities, featuring authors like Musharraf Ali Farooqi, Zulfikar Ghose, Husain Naqvi and Mohsin Hamid.

Comprising of tributes, readings, book launches and discussions, the festival was well attended by literary buffs, students, writers and the general public. One of the highlights of the day was the launch of 50 Poems: 30 Selected 20 New by the critically acclaimed author Zulfikar Ghose. A panel discussion on Sufism and Literature brought together Samina Quraeshi, Amar Jaleel and Mahmood Jamal. While Quraeshi read an excerpt from her recent book, Jamal read a poem directed at fundamentalists of all kinds while commenting that Sufism was not a deviant cult as many perceived it to be.

In the end, many in the audience were left frustrated as an interesting question by a student about the role of Shariah in the context of Sufism went unanswered and was cleverly deflected under the garb of sophisticated expression. Ameena Saiyid, Managing Director of the Oxford University Press and Journalist Asif Noorani talked about what makes a best seller in Pakistan in an interactive session titled “From Manuscript to Bestseller”.

Full report here Daily Times

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Karachi Literature Festival off to auspicious start

Sponsored jointly by the British Council and the Oxford University Press, the first-ever literary extravaganza in town, the Karachi Literature Festival, got off to an auspicious start Saturday, March 21 morning at a local hotel with two days (March 20 and 21) of intellectually refreshing and productive programmes.

Mahshood Rizvi, Director, British Council (Sindh-Balochistan), welcomed the guests to the two-day round of activities with a resolve to make the festival an annual event and to make it a major international one. Mrs Ameena Saiyid, Managing Director, Oxford University Press (OUP), said that publishing faced many challenges in Pakistan. One of these, she said, was cultivating the reading habit among the public, which she thought was at a really low level. “We have to bring them from the jewellery shops to the bookshops. The field was really wide in Pakistan, she said, but stressed that what was needed was for publishers to be innovative and imaginative. Pakistan, she said, was a researcher’s delight and the opportunity awaiting the publishing industry in Pakistan was like an unborn spirit anxiously waiting to come into this world.

Shamsur Rehman Farooqi, a noted literary figure from India while felicitating the organisers of the festival, lamented the very tardy pace of transportation and communication between India and Pakistan. He said that when coming out to Pakistan for this trip he was dismayed to learn that there was only one flight to Pakistan every week and that for the coming two weeks, he could just forget travel.  He was of the opinion that festivals like these entailing people-to-people contacts could go a long way in mitigating the absolutely futile hostility between the two countries, a hostility that has proved mutually detrimental to the people of both countries. He said those born in the 1950s and the 60s on both sides of the divide had no idea of, and no affinity to, each other. It is this category of people between whom interaction should be initiated.

After the inauguration, noted literary figure and an authority on Shakespeare, conducted a workshop on creative writing. He lamented that the overall decline and change for the sake of change, had brought about some rather unwanted changes if the novel today, which he said today was not at all character-centred. Quoting novels by Dickens and others, he said novels in the past were character-centred which gave them a profound and poignant quality. He said the undesirable change began in the 1960s with Saul Bellow’s works which sounded the death knell of classical fiction.

He lamented that today, writing of fiction was market-driven.

Another session with US-based Pakistani novelist, Bapsi Sidhwa, was a very profound exercise. The session, moderated by Ishrat Lindblad, got all the participants involved in a lively discussion about issues arising from her novels, like, The Bride, The Icecandy Man Cometh, and others. The discussions of most of her novels were a nostalgic trip back in time, to the time of the partition of the sub-continent and the traumatic events that entailed, and how it profoundly affected lives.

Full report here The News