Background
Hussein grew up in Karachi, where he attended Lady Jennings School and the Convent of Jesus and Mary. He spent most summers with his mother"s family in India.
(Usman is visiting post-war London from Pakistan when he m...)
Usman is visiting post-war London from Pakistan when he meets a young aspiring artist called Lydia who has, like himself, come out of an unhappy marriage. Just as the lonely strangers' friendship begins to blossom into something deeper Usman has to return to Karachi, leaving Lydia behind. Two years later, Lydia impulsively abandons her life in London and boards a ship to Karachi, where the two are married. But as the years flit by Usman feels distanced from his life and realises that he hasn't noticed the buds of the gulmohar tree unfurl. A beautiful account of a marriage that is in turns wry and unashamedly romantic.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B018M3SPA8/?tag=2022091-20
( "A thing of beauty. . . . You must read it."—Nadeem Asl...)
"A thing of beauty. . . . You must read it."—Nadeem Aslam "A shower of pleasures."—Julia O'Faolain "Sophisticated, cosmopolitan and seductive, the novel engages mind and senses alike."—André Naffis-Sahely, The Times Literary Supplement Like his parents, he too spent many hours sending cloud messages to other places, messages of longing for something that he knew existed otherwhere. London, that distant rainy place his father lived in once, is where Mehran finds himself after leaving Karachi in his teens. And it is there that his adult life unfolds: he discovers the joys of poetry, faces the trials of love and work, and spends his dreaming hours "sending cloud messages to other places," hoping, one day, to tell his own story. A feeling of not quite belonging anywhere pursues Mehran as he travels to Italy, India, and Pakistan. But the relationships he forms—with wounded, passionate Marvi, volatile Marco, and the enigmatic Riccarda—and his power of recollection finally bring him some sense, however fleeting, of home. Aamer Hussein was born in Karachi in 1955 and moved to London in his teens. He lectures at the University of Southampton and the Institute of English Studies and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His novella Another Gulmohar Tree was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Europe and South Asia 2010.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1846590892/?tag=2022091-20
( “A lovely, strange and very moving novel. The colours a...)
“A lovely, strange and very moving novel. The colours and shape develop as you read while the couple’s mutual understanding moves forward and upward over the years like two branches of blossom meeting at the top of the tree.”—Ruth Padel Usman and Lydia meet in postwar London and fall in love. But as the years flit by, Usman feels a growing distance between them. When he realizes that he hasn’t noticed the buds of the gulmohar tree unfurl, he understands that he has lost sight of his love for his wife. Aamer Hussein was born in Karachi in 1955 and moved to London in his teens. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1846590566/?tag=2022091-20
Hussein grew up in Karachi, where he attended Lady Jennings School and the Convent of Jesus and Mary. He spent most summers with his mother"s family in India.
He studied in Ootacamund, South India, for two years before moving to London in 1970.
Hussein is fluent in seven languages: English, Urdu, Hindi, French, Italian, Spanish and Persian. He read Persian, Urdu and History at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, and later taught Urdu for many years at the SOAS Language Centre. He has since lectured in the English Department at Queen Mary, University of London, was Director of the Master of Arts programme in National and International Literatures at the School of Advanced Study"s Institute of English Studies (Senate House)(2005-2008) and is now Professorial Writing Fellow at the University of Southampton, as well as a professorial research associate at the Centre for the Study of Pakistan.
He has also held writing fellowships at the University of Southampton and at Imperial College London, and served as a judge for the Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation (2009), the Impac Prize (2008), the Commonwealth Prize (2007) and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (2002).
He is a trustee of the magazine of international contemporary writing Wasafiri. His first collection of stories, Mirror to the Sun, was published in 1993.
Since then, to increasing critical acclaim from contemporaries such as Shena Mackay, William Palmer, Mary Flanagan, Amit Chaudhuri and Tabish Khair, he has published four further collections - This Other Salt (1999), Turquoise (2002), Cactus Town (2003), and Insomnia (2007) - as well as the novella, Another Gulmohar Tree (2009) and the novel The Cloud Messenger (2011). He has also edited a volume of stories by Pakistani women, Kahani (2005), which includes his own translations from the Urdu of Altaf Fatima, Khalida Hussain and Hijab Imtiaz Ali.
He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004, "probably the first writer of Pakistani origin to be elected".
His reviews have appeared in the Literary Review, The Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman and are now regularly seen on the book pages of The Independent. He has also written essays on Urdu literature for The Annual of Urdu Studies and Moving Worlds, and in 2012 he published a selection of stories in Urdu in the Karachi journal Duniyazad.
(Usman is visiting post-war London from Pakistan when he m...)
( “A lovely, strange and very moving novel. The colours a...)
( "A thing of beauty. . . . You must read it."—Nadeem Asl...)