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How to pronounce Tahmima Anam: Emphasis on the second syllable of last name
Tahmima Anam is the recipient of a Commonwealth Writers Prize, an O. Henry Prize, and has been named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and was recently elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, she was educated at Mount Holyoke College and Harvard University and now lives in London where she is on the board of ROLI, a music tech company founded by her husband.
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Did you always want to be a writer? You have a Ph.D. in social anthropology do you ever consider returning to the academic world?
I wasn't a very devoted academicI found the idea of writing something that
had to stick to a certain notion of truthfulness very difficult. Anthropology is
certainly the most literary of the social sciences, and yet one still has to
adhere to a loose sense of "what really happened." I wanted a genre that
would allow me to tell my readers something about what it was like to have lived
through the Bangladesh war, something visceral and palpable. In this case, not
having to stick to the facts really enabled that act of the imagination.
Having said all of that, I miss being part of an academic institution. I spent
so many years in grad school that I now fi nd myself feeling a bit lost when
September rolls around and there aren't any classes to attend. And I love to
teach, so perhaps someday I will teach creative writing.
Where do you write? Do you tend to follow a strict work schedule or write in
spurts of activity?
What I'm about to tell you is very odd, I know, but it happens to be true: I
wrote almost all of A Golden Age ...
We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
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