Daniyal Mueenuddin

Daniyal Mueenuddin دانیال معین الدین
Daniyal Mueenuddin reads an excerpt from his short story “Nawabdin Electrician”, London, 2009
Born	Daniyal Mueenuddin 1963 Los Angeles, USA
Nationality	Pakistani-American
Occupation	Author
Known for	Critically short-story
Website	Daniyal Mueenuddin's Official Website

Daniyal Mueenuddin (Urdu: دانیال معین الدین‎) (born 1963) is a Pakistani-American author who writes in English. His short-story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, has been translated into sixteen languages, and won The Story Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and other honors and critical acclaim.

Born in Los Angeles, USA, he spent his childhood in Pakistan. At the age of thirteen he moved to the USA, where he received higher education and worked as a journalist, a director, a lawyer, a businessman, before finally devoting his efforts to writing.

Mueenuddin was born in Los Angeles, USA, to a Pakistani father Ghulam Mueenuddin and a second-generation Norwegian-American mother, Barbara. His father was a member of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), and after the independence of Pakistan in 1947 he became Secretary of Pakistan's Establishment Division, which administered the civil service (later he was the country's Chief Election Commissioner). In the late 1950s, Mueenuddin's father was posted for several years to Washington as chief negotiator of the Indus Waters Treaty (1960) between India and Pakistan where he met his future American wife Barbara, a reporter at The Washington Post. After a courtship and marriage they moved to Pakistan in 1960, living first in Rawalpindi and later in Lahore. Keeping with an agreement she had made with her father, a surgeon in Los Angeles who had heard of unsanitary conditions in Pakistani hospitals, his expectant mother flew back to the U.S. and Mueenuddin was born in Los Angeles in April. Two months later mother and child returned to Rawalpindi, Pakistan, then the country's temporary capital. Several years later, the family moved to Lahore, where Mueenuddin attended the Lahore American School. Mueenuddin remembers his youth there as a "magical" time which included hunting and riding. Mueenuddin and his brother Tamur often visited the US in the summers.