Brisbane Times Interviews Kamila Shamsie

I read Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire's twice in prison. She brought Antigone to modern Britain. Well worth reading, also worth reading was this interview, ‘Earning a living doing the thing you love is kind of sexy’.

“All writing is political.” Discuss. Yes and no. All writing is political in as much as we live within power structures. If you really dig into writing, somewhere there’s a power dynamic at play. There are writers who stay away from being what they think of as political, and there are those who jump in.

And where does your writing fit on that spectrum? I’m really interested in how politics gets into people’s lives. It’s an inescapable fact of having grown up in Pakistan. One of my earliest memories is being four years old and going to visit my uncle, who was a political prisoner in Abbottabad under house arrest.

sch 12/23/22