Aamer Hussein

Aamer Hussein was born in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1955. He came to Britain to study in 1970 and graduated from SOAS, going on to teach Urdu at its Language Centre for many years. He is the author of four collections of stories: Mirror to the Sun (1993), This Other Salt (1999), Turquoise = (2003), and Cactus Town: Selected Stories (Pakistan only, 2003). Hussein regularly reviews for the Independent. Also a literary critic and translator, he has rediscovered several forgotten Urdu classics, particularly by women. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and now lectures on the MA program in National and International Literatures (Senate House), and is RLF Writing Fellow at Imperial College. He is currently translating a novel by the early twentieth-century writer Tyaba Bilgrami. Saqi are reissuing his much-lauded collection, This Other Salt, in April. He has edited Kahani: Short Stories by Pakistani Women (June 2005), part of Saqi's new series of international women's writing.

''Each story, remarkable in both expansiveness and precision, sings with heartbreak, intelligence and elegy'', Kamila Shamsie.

''Whether he is writing of Java, Pakistan or London, his writing, uniquely his own, many-layered and full of references and allusions, imbued with the music of the Gamelan and Persian and Urdu poetry, crosses continents'', Shena McKay.

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