Daniyal Mueenuddin

Daniyal Mueenuddin (; born 1963) is a Pakistani-American author who writes in English. His short story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, has been translated into sixteen languages, and won The Story Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and other honors and critical acclaim. His father was a member of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), and after the independence of Pakistan in 1947 he became Secretary of Pakistan's Establishment Division, which administered the civil service (later he was the country's Chief Election Commissioner). In the late 1950s, Mueenuddin's father was posted for several years to Washington as chief negotiator of the Indus Waters Treaty between India and Pakistan where he met his future wife Barbara, Keeping with an agreement she had made with her father, a surgeon in Los Angeles who had heard of unsanitary conditions in Pakistani hospitals, his expectant mother flew back to the U.S. and Mueenuddin was born in Los Angeles in April 1963. Two months later mother and child returned to Rawalpindi, then Pakistan's temporary capital. Several years later, the family moved to Lahore, where Mueenuddin attended the Lahore American School. often visited the US in the summers. His mother was a Trustee of PEN American Center and died in October 2009.) In 1990 his father died, leaving Mueenuddin more exposed but also more independent. He ran the farm as a business, and not in the traditional feudal way like many of his neighbors, by "hiring good managers, paying them well, and demanding a lot of them." This gained the attention of a literary agent, who then helped him to publish a story in Granta and three stories in The New Yorker. Mueenuddin's first collection of stories In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was published in February 2009 (four new stories, plus the four previously published). His novel This Is Where the Serpent Lives was published in January 2026. Mueenuddin's writing is influenced by Anton Chekov; he has said "I like the Russians, like everyone else. I am constantly reading Chekov. I am never not reading Chekov."

Awards Mueenuddin was the winner of the 2010 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was the winner of The Story Prize for 2009, and the 2010 Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Best First Book, Europe and South Asia). The collection was also one of four finalists for the 2009 National Book Awards, one of three finalists for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, and was a finalist for the 2010 Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award, and the 2010 Ondaatje Prize. In addition, it was selected among TIME magazine's top ten books of the year, Publishers Weekly's top ten books of 2009, The Economist's top ten fiction books of 2009, The Guardian's best books of the year, the New Statesman's best books of the year, and The New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year.

One of his short stories, "Nawabdin Electrician", was selected by Salman Rushdie for the Best American Short Stories of 2008. Mueenuddin's first published story, "Our Lady of Paris," which appeared in Zoetrope, was a finalist for the 2007 National Magazine Awards in fiction.

Personal life Mueenuddin is married to Cecilie Brenden Mueenuddin, a Norwegian anthropologist whom he met while on a Fulbright Scholarship in Oslo, Norway. Porter died in 1980 and his mother became one of the trustees of the Porter literary estate.