Zia Haider Rahman
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Harvard University, Radcliffe Fellowship
New America, Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellowship
Dartmouth College, Montgomery Fellowship
Southern New Hampshire University, Honorary Doctorate
Zia Haider Rahman | |
|---|---|
 Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2018 | |
| Born | |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Oxford University Cambridge University Yale University Stiftung Maximilianeum |
| Notable awards | James Tait Black Memorial Prize Harvard University, Radcliffe Fellowship New America, Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellowship Dartmouth College, Montgomery Fellowship Southern New Hampshire University, Honorary Doctorate |
| Website | |
| www | |
Zia Haider Rahman (/ˈziːə ˈhaɪdər ˈrɑːmən/) (ⓘ) is a British novelist and broadcaster. His novel In the Light of What We Know was published in 2014 to international critical acclaim and translated into many languages.[1] He was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Britain’s oldest literary prize, previous winners of which include Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie and Cormac McCarthy.[2]
Rahman was born in Bangladesh in the region of Sylhet.[3] His mother tongue is Bengali. His family moved to England when Rahman was small, where they were squatters in a derelict building before being moved to a council estate. His father was a bus conductor and waiter and his mother a seamstress. He attended Hampstead School in London. In an interview with Guernica, he said that he "grew up in poverty, in some of the worst conditions in a developed economy."[4]
Rahman was a college scholar at Balliol College,[5] one of the constituent colleges of Oxford University, and received a first-class honours degree in mathematics[6] before completing further studies in mathematics, economics, and law at the Maximilianeum, a foundation for gifted students, and Munich, Cambridge, and Yale universities. He briefly worked as an investment banker for Goldman Sachs in New York before practising as a corporate lawyer and then as an international human rights lawyer with the Open Society Foundations, focusing on grand corruption in Africa.[7] He has also worked as an anti-corruption activist for Transparency International in South Asia.[8]
Work
In the Light of What We Know, a novel, received plaudits internationally, earning high praise from literary critics such as James Wood,[9] Joyce Carol Oates,[10] Louise Adler,[11] and Amitava Kumar.[12] The novel appeared in numerous end of year "Best of" lists. According to Rahman, most of the book was written at Yaddo in upstate New York.[13]
Rahman's writing has appeared in The New York Times,[14] The Guardian, The New York Review of Books[15] and elsewhere. He is a contributor to A Point of View, a long-running weekly radio show broadcast on BBC Radio 4 to an audience of over a million.[16][17] He is also a documentary maker.[18][19] Rahman is a critic of liberal elites.[20] From an interview with Rahman in The New York Review of Books:[21]
"There are so few class migrants into the liberal elites. When I was on the road at literary festivals promoting my novel, more than once I was told I really ought to meet [novelists] Mohsin Hamid or Kamila Shamsie. I’m not naive: liberal elites see race before class and are blind to the gulf between my background and the highly privileged one of the likes of Hamid, who attended Aitchison College, Pakistan’s Eton."
He is now working on a nonfiction book proposal, a memoir, that would explore this theme — of a liberal who has issues with liberals.
Rahman led a project at Harvard University using machine learning, network science, and publicly available data to map the world's elites and their political, business and social inter-relationships, with the mission of raising transparency in the public space.[22]
