Kamila Shamsie wins Women’s Prize for Fiction

Seven has proved to be a lucky number for Kamila Shamsie as her seventh novel, Home Fire, won the Women’s prize for fiction on June 6.

Regarded as one of the most prestigious literary awards, the Women’s prize — known previously as the Baileys prize for fiction — is given annually to celebrate “excellence, originality and accessibility in writing by women in English from throughout the world.” This is Shamsie’s third nomination; she was previously shortlisted for A God in Every Stone in 2015 and Burnt Shadows in 2009.

Home Fire had set literary circles abuzz even before its release in August last year and was hotly anticipated to win the Man Booker Prize. An adaptation of the classical Greek play Antigone, it re-imagines the key players of ancient Thebes’s civil war as ordinary young British Pakistanis in the present day, caught up in a tangle of familial devotion and political allegiance: young Parvaiz has become a jihadi and when he dies, he is refused burial in his homeland, the United Kingdom. His twin sister, Aneeka, desperate to bring her brother home, finds an ally in Eamonn whose father is the very man preventing the return of Parvaiz’s body. Eamonn is torn between his love for Aneeka and loyalty to his father and, in an ironic turn of events, ends up placing his father in precisely the same position as Aneeka.

Sarah Sands — journalist, author and chairperson of the judges’ panel at this year’s awards — stated that the winning book “spoke for our times.” Considering that an important element of the story is militant religiosity, it would certainly speak for the vast amounts of global coverage given to religious extremism in recent years. However, Home Fire is also timeless in Shamsie’s depiction of the young and the misdirected struggling to make sense of their chaotic world, looking for guidance and help from the supposedly more experienced, only to realise that ‘good’ advice and ‘smart’ decisions do not necessarily produce the ‘right’ results.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 15th, 2018