Stories by Claire Chambers
On 20 July Andy Burnham became Britain’s seventh prime minister in the decade since the 2016 Brexit referendum. He...
Published 02 Aug, 2026 07:18am
In May 2026, the World Health Organisation declared Ebola in DR Congo and Uganda a “public health emergency of...
Published 31 May, 2026 06:58am
The poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was written by T.S. Eliot in 1915. Despite the poet’s young age — ...
Published 29 Mar, 2026 07:16am
Interviewing him in London many years ago, I asked Daniyal Mueenuddin what he was working on after his acclaimed...
Published 25 Jan, 2026 09:10am
I have written in these pages before about my forays into learning Urdu. Now I think through the need for mentors in...
Published 23 Nov, 2025 05:54am
In her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy recounts how literary agent David Godwin flew from Britain to...
Published 21 Sep, 2025 09:48am
What kind of political or ethical force, if any, can literature still exert in contemporary culture?
Published 20 Jul, 2025 11:11am
In The Museum Detective, Maha Khan Phillips returns with a fast-paced archaeological thriller. Set in Karachi, the...
Published 18 May, 2025 08:25am
‘True crime’ has existed in some guise since the late 19th century, but it got its name in the 1960s. Books in...
Published 16 Mar, 2025 11:32am
This summer I was awarded a GCSE in Urdu. I’m now inching towards an A-level in the language. I was inspired to...
Published 19 Jan, 2025 08:48am
Since my last column about Saadat Hasan Manto’s story ‘Tamasha’, I came across his sketch ‘Hindi Aur Urdu’ (1954). Then I read
Published 10 Nov, 2024 09:41am
Last time I wrote about learning Urdu, with a special focus on Ismat Chughtai’s writing. For me, 2024 has been the...
Published 08 Sep, 2024 09:32am
Since March 2020, I have been making a concerted effort to learn Urdu. Recently, I took GCSE exams in this beautiful, expressive
Published 07 Jul, 2024 07:42am
The Bangladeshi-American author Rumaan Alam wrote Leave the World Behind just before the Covid-19 pandemic. The novel was...
Published 05 May, 2024 07:42am
This year marks the 100th anniversary of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. When he published the novel in 1924, ...
Published 03 Mar, 2024 08:42am
In a literary marketplace saturated with Eurocentric accounts of motherhood, Suma Din’s creative non-fiction work,...
Published 31 Dec, 2023 08:47am
Karachi-born Farah Ali is the author of the short story collection People Want to Live (McSweeney’s, 2021). That book is being...
Published 29 Oct, 2023 07:03am
Amitav Ghosh’s latest work, a nonfiction book titled Smoke and Ashes, was published in India this July. Being in New Delhi at the
Published 27 Aug, 2023 08:53am
Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s debut novel, The Centre, takes readers into a cutthroat world of language, translation ...
Published 25 Jun, 2023 05:15am
In South Asia, where women are often subjected to a lot of pressure, climate change is also an urgent problem....
Published 19 Feb, 2023 08:28am
