Contents
Mirza Waheed (born 1974) is an Indian British novelist and a former journalist. He plays cricket for the Authors Cricket Club named Authors XI team, which is composed of British writers.
Wiki/Biography
Mirza Waheed was born in 1974 (age 49 years in 2023) in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India. He has written for several newspapers and magazines like BBC, The Guardian, Granta, Al Jazeera English, The New York Times, and Guernica. Mirza Waheed worked at BBC from 2001 to 2011 for ten years. In 2011, he quit his job to pursue a full-time writing career and wrote his second book. Currently, he lives in London with his family.
Mirza Waheed in his youth
Family
Parents & Siblings
There is not much information about his parents and siblings.
Wife & Children
Mirza Waheed is married and has two children, a thirteen year old son and a nine years old daughter.
Mirza Waheed’s daughter in her childhood
Religion
Mirza Waheed follows Islam.
Signature/Autograph
Career
Books
The Collaborator (2012)
The plot of Mirza Waheed’s novel The Collaborator is set in Kashmir, his native territory, which is riven by violence between Pakistan and India. Mirza Waheed exposes, with tremendous sensitivity and compassionate indignation that transcends the verbal posturing of India and Pakistan, what it means to live in a region where the government in charge views you as an enemy within and the government next door views you as a strategically useful puppet.
The Book of Gold Leaves (2014)
Mirza Waheed’s second novel, The Book of Gold Leaves, was published in 2014. He has crafted a beautiful classic tale of forbidden love in a state which is disrupted by war, blood and politics. The Book of Gold Leaves is a classic story about heartbreakingly relevant scenarios. The story of Roohi and Faiz is a story of love, and spiritual oneness amidst the chaos of death, destruction, and rebellion. In the Financial Times, a British daily business newspaper, Alice Albinia, a journalist reviewed the film, which is about a Sunni and a Shia who fall in love in the turbulent Kashmir of the 1990s. She called it,
a haunting illustration of how, at the end of last century, normal life became impossible for many of those who call Kashmir home.”
Tell Her Everything (2019)
Mirza Waheed’s third novel, Tell Her Everything, was published in January 2019. The book portrays a father-daughter relationship in the story where a father is preparing to reveal his own morally objectionable past to his grown-up daughter who he sent away to boarding school for studies when she was a child.
Awards, Honours, Achievements
- In 2011, Mirza Waheed’s book The Collaborator gained the title of Books of the Year in the magazine New Statesman, and the newspapers The Telegraph, Business Standard, and Telegraph India. In the same year, The Collaborator was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Shakti Bhatt Prize.
- In 2012, Mirza Waheed’s novel The Collaborator was longlist for Desmond Elliott Prize.
- Mirza Waheed’s second novel, The Book of Gold Leaves, was shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, one of the most prestigious international literary awards specifically focused on South Asian writing in 2016.
- In 2019, Mirza Waheed was awarded The Hindu Literary Prize for his third novel, Tell Her Everything.
Facts/Trivia
- Mirza Waheed loves photography and he often posts pictures of nature and animals on his social media.
- Mirza Waheed refused to attend the Jaipur Literature Festival in January 2019. He rather spent his time looking after his children than embark on an ambitious book tour. In an interview, Mirza Waheed said,
I do not go to many festivals. I stay home with my two kids. I am not going to get a second chance. My daughter is not going to be four again. I am old enough to realise that is the most important thing. The choice is very clear.”
- In February 2019, Mirza Waheed attended a book review of his novel Tell Her Everything, in New Delhi, India.
Author Mirza Waheed at a book review of Tell Her Everything, in New Delhi, India