Fatima Farheen Mirza

Mirza was born and raised in California.^[3] Her parents are both of Indian descent; her mother grew up to a British Indian family in Birmingham, while her father immigrated to the United States from Hyderabad.^[4] She grew up in an observant Muslim family.^[5]

Mirza attended the University of California, Riverside, where she pursued medical studies at first but made a career shift to creative writing as an undergraduate.^[3] She later graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop^[3][6][7] and received the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship.^[8] She has taught at the University of Iowa and New York University.^[9]

Mirza submitted the book manuscript for her debut novel A Place for Us for publication in 2017.^[10] The 400-page novel^[11] was the first book to be published by actor Sarah Jessica Parker's new imprint in collaboration with Crown Publishing Group, called SJP for Hogarth.^[12] A Place for Us took Mirza eight years to write,^[10] and explores the shifting dynamics in a Muslim immigrant family living in the States after having immigrated from Hyderabad, India. The novel was reviewed by the New York Times,^[13] the Los Angeles Review of Books,^[14] and The Washington Post.^[15] The book was a 2018 bestseller,^[2] and was named among the best books of 2018 by The Washington Post,^[16] Buzzfeed,^[17] and People magazine.^[18] She has been a guest on a number of podcasts celebrating her writing career such as Riff Raff,^[19] Books with Jen,^[20] Shalwar Kameez Dreams^[21] and Bridge India's Voices.^[22]

Mirza was nominated by author Tommy Orange as an honoree for the National Book Award Foundation's "5 Under 35" list.^[23]

Mirza married British actor Riz Ahmed in 2020 after meeting at a coffee shop in Brooklyn in 2018.^[24][25][26] In 2025, Ahmed revealed that Mirza had given birth to their first child.^[27]