Nazneen Sadiq is an Indian-born Canadian writer. Focusing on the immigrant experience, she has authored fiction books for young people and adults about finding a sense of self and place in Canada. Her work looks closely at the ways family and background influence youthful searches for identity, belonging, and independence.
Background
Nazneen Sadiq was born on June 19, 1944, in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India. She was the third of four children in a family of Mohammed Anwar Sheikh, a civil servant, and Dilafroze Sheikh, an educationist and consultant to the government for the first Women’s Aid program in Pakistan.
Education
Nazneen Sadiq moved with her family to West Pakistan after the division of India in 1947. She grew up in a comfortable but sheltered environment. Her early years were full of literary and linguistic influences. The family spoke English and Urdu at home.
Her father told her stories and encouraged her to read by ordering complete sets of the works of classic and popular authors. One grandfather wrote and recited poetry. Reading, listening to the radio, and visiting relatives were her chief recreations.
Sadiq received a British education in an all-girls convent setting. According to herself, it “was a Victorian upbringing because all the references to the West and the outside world were British.” It was only when her mother returned from the United States, an opportunity, unusual for a Pakistani woman of the time, to study for a year abroad, that Nazneen Sadiq encountered another western perspective. In addition to a master’s degree in child psychology, her mother returned with a “very vigorous and free American influence.”
Sadiq found herself with an opportunity to experience American culture firsthand sooner than she might ever have expected. At sixteen, she was sent for a year to Sunset High School in Dallas, Texas. At the end of the year, she had completed high school and broadened her social and cultural horizons considerably.
Back in Pakistan, Nazneen Sadiq began studies in philosophy and literature at the University of the Punjab and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1964.
Career
Nazneen Sadiq started her career in Canada where she emigrated in 1964. Although grown up with a sense that she would write, Sadiq put that idea aside for a while when she stayed home to raise two daughters in Thornhill, Ontario.
When an opportunity to write for Thornhill’s community papers arose in the late 1970s, Sadiq took it up. From 1977 to 1978, she contributed for the local periodical Liberal and York View. It was a modest but practical start.
A visit to Pakistan in 1983 caused Sadiq to realize how passionately she felt about many issues and how much she wanted to write seriously about them. On her return to Canada, she wrote a journal, “Smile, You’re in Pakistan.” The debut work found a serious market. It appeared over the course of a year as a serial feature in a Pakistani English monthly. Beginning that same year, she worked as a freelance correspondent for Newsline magazine in Karachi, Pakistan.
Shortly afterwards, James Lorimer & Company, Publishers asked Sadiq to submit a story. The work she delivered persuaded them to ask her for enough stories for a book. By 1985, Camels Can Make You Homesick and Other Stories, a collection for preteen readers, was in print. Its five stories focused on what life in Canada is like for children of South Asian parents.
Sadiq’s second book, a novel for young adults, followed in 1988. Inspired by the real-life ordeal of two of her daughter’s friends, ‘Heartbreak High’ presented a romance that runs headlong into the cultural and religious baggage older generations bring with them to a new country.
Sadiq experienced a new approach to writing with Lucy, her third novel for young people issued in 1989. Written for a series of books based on the Degrassi Junior High television program, Lucy had to be true to preconceived characters and a pre-defined setting. That same year, Sadiq joined the staff of Globe and Mail newspaper where she worked as a freelance writer and book reviewer till 1992.
The latest works by Sadiq is a 2010 a memoir book ‘Moon Over Marrakech’ and a 2015 volume ‘The Place of Shining Light’ both published under the name Nazneen Sheikh.
Politics
Nazneen Sadiq is a convinced liberal.
Views
Quotations:
"I was a late bloomer. I published later on in life because I was busy raising my family first."
Membership
Nazneen Sadiq has been a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada and PEN Canada.
Personality
Nazneen Sadiq’s voice is authentic, according to reviewers. Her stories are rooted in her own experiences and those of people she knows.
Quotes from others about the person
"Sadiq writes perceptively and with gentle humor about how important it is to appear the same and yet how beautiful it is to be different." Tim Wynne-Jones, book reviewer
Connections
Nazneen Sadiq married in 1964. She has two daughters, Laara and Zorana.