Zia Haider Rahman
| Zia Haider Rahman | |
|---|---|
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| Born | Sylhet Division, Bangladesh |
| Occupation | Author |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Balliol College, Oxford |
| Website | |
| ziahaiderrahman |
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Zia Haider Rahman (Bengali: জিয়া হায়দার রহমান, /ziːə haɪdər rɑːmən/) is a British novelist who was born in Bangladesh and raised in the UK. His debut novel, In the Light of What We Know, was published in 2014 to international critical acclaim. In August 2015, Rahman was awarded the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Britain’s oldest literary prize. In 2016 he was the recipient of the inaugural International Ranald McDonald prize.
In 2017 Rahman has been appointed to a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University , and to a Director’s Visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton .
Rahman is also an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow 2017 at New America, Washington DC.
He was awarded the Michael & Nina Sundell and the James Silberman & Selma Shapiro Fellowships at Yaddo in 2017. Rahman is also a Senior Fellow at the Bruno Kreisky Forum, Vienna.
Rahman was born in rural Bangladesh in the region of Sylhet and has said that his mother tongue was Sylheti and not Bengali, although he understands some Bengali. His family moved to the UK, 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. Rahman attended a comprehensive school. In an interview with Guernica, he remarked that he "grew up in poverty, in some of the worst conditions in a developed economy. Rahman took a first class honours degree from Balliol College, Oxford, with further studies at the Maximilianeum and Munich, Cambridge and Yale universities. He worked as an investment banker for Goldman Sachs in New York before practicing as a corporate lawyer and then as an international human rights lawyer focusing on corruption. He has also worked as an anti-corruption activist for Transparency International.
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