Education
He went to school in Pakistan and later studied electrical engineering at the Imperial College London and Masters of Business Administration at the University of Melbourne.
He went to school in Pakistan and later studied electrical engineering at the Imperial College London and Masters of Business Administration at the University of Melbourne.
He migrated to Australia in 1994 and lives in Melbourne, Australia. Abidi has written translations, travelogues, and a number of short stories, including the Borgesian The Secret History of the Flying Carpet, which is a fictitious story in a seemingly scholarly essay. His first novel,, was published by Viking Penguin in Australia, United States of America, Canada and India and translated into Spanish and Portuguese.
lieutenant is set in Europe during the eighteenth century and is the fictionalised story of a true life Brazilian priest and aviation pioneer, Bartolomeu de Gusmão, who built a flying ship but fell foul of the Inquisition.
Passarola Rising was shortlisted for the 2006 Melbourne Literature Prize. In his second novel, Twilight (2008), Abidi turns to domestic and realist themes.
Secretariat in Pakistan during the 1980s, it is the story of an elderly matriarch, and her reaction to the changes she sees in her family and society during the turbulent times. Twilight is published by Text Publishing in Australia and by Viking Penguin in the United States of America and India.
lieutenant appears in the United States of America as The House of Bilqis (2009).
In 2010, Abidi wrote an essay on Pakistan, The Road to Chitral, for Granta Online, which is a travelogue and a meditation on violence in the region. The Australian interviews Azhar Abidi The Age feature on Azhar Abidi The Dawn interview Azhar Abidi examines the emigrant experience in the Wall Street Journal.
Written in the style of an old-fashioned adventure story, it is a veiled criticism of the scientific materialism emerging from the European Enlightenment, and its inability to explain spiritual and supernatural phenomena.