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Home Fire

INTRODUCTION

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF KAMILA SHAMSIE

Kamila Shamsie was born in 1973 in Pakistan, the daughter of journalist and editor Muneeza Shamsie. Shamsie was brought up in Karachi before attending Hamilton College in New York, and then she received an MFA from the University of

Massachusetts, Amherst. Shamsie wrote her first novel, In the City by the Sea, while she was still in college, and it was

published when she was 25 years old. Between 2000 and 2014, Shamsie wrote five additional novels. Her novels have won the Patras Bokhari Award, a prestigious literary award in Pakistan. Home Fire, her seventh novel, won the 2018 Women’s

with characters in the novel directly correlating to characters in the play (Isma to Ismene, Aneeka to Antigone, Eamonn to

Haemon, Karamat to Creon, and Parvaiz to Polynices). The major plot points of the novel also follow the developments of the play closely. Shamsie has also credited the documentary play Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State as a major source of inspiration and research for her novel. Shamsie has written several other books on similar subjects, including Burnt Shadows, Kartography, Broken Verses, In the City by the Sea, Salt and Saffron, and A God in Every Stone. For another

reinterpretation of a classic told through the lens of

contemporary Muslim families, Uzma Jalaluddin’s Ayesha at Last is a modern retelling of

Prize for Fiction. Shamsie moved to London in 2007 and is a KEY FACTS

dual citizen of the UK and Pakistan.

• Full Title: Home Fire

HISTORICAL CONTEXT • When Written: 2014-2017

Shamsie wrote Home Fire in the wake of the rise of ISIS (also • Where Written: London, England

known as ISIL, or the Islamic State), a terrorist militant group • When Published: August 15, 2017

that follows a fundamentalist jihadist doctrine of Sunni Islam. • Literary Period: Contemporary