Aamer Hussein

Aamer Hussein (born 8 April 1955) is a Pakistani critic and short story writer.

Early life and education Hussein was born and grew up in Karachi,

Career He read Persian, Urdu and History at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, and later taught Urdu for many years at the SOAS Language Centre. He has since lectured in the English Department at Queen Mary, University of London, was Director of the MA programme in National and International Literatures at the School of Advanced Study's Institute of English Studies (Senate House) (2005–2008) and is now Professorial Writing Fellow at the University of Southampton, as well as a professorial research associate at the Centre for the Study of Pakistan. He has also held writing fellowships at the University of Southampton and at Imperial College London, and served as a judge for the Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation (2009), the Impac Prize (2008), the Commonwealth Prize (2007) and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (2002). He is a trustee of the magazine of international contemporary writing Wasafiri.

Some of Hussein's earliest stories, such as "The Colour of a Loved Person's Eyes", "Little Tales", "Your Children" and "Karima", appeared in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the journals Critical Quarterly and Artrage, and anthologies including Colours of a New Day: Writing for South Africa (Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), God: An Anthology of Fiction (Serpent's Tail, 1992) and Border Lines: Stories of Exile & Home (Serpent's Tail, 1994). New Statesman and are now regularly seen on the book pages of The Independent. He has also written essays on Urdu literature for The Annual of Urdu Studies and Moving Worlds, and in 2012, he published a selection of stories in Urdu in the Karachi journal Duniyazad.

Selected bibliography This Other Salt (Saqi Books, 1999) Turquoise (Saqi Books, 2002) Insomnia (Telegram Books, 2007) Another Gulmohar Tree (Telegram Books, 2009) The Cloud Messenger (Telegram Books, 2011) The Swan's Wife (ILQA, 2014; republished as 37 Bridges, HarperCollins, 2015)