Claire Chambers

COLUMN: ‘TRUE CRIME’ IN PAKISTAN

‘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

COLUMN: A-LEVELS URDU AND MASTUR’S AANGAN

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

COLUMN: HINDI AND URDU

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

COLUMN: THE TRANSLATION TAMASHA

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

COLUMN: THE ELEPHANT IN ‘LIHAAF’

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

COLUMN: THINGS FALL APART

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

COLUMN: REVISITING E.M. FORSTER’S INDIA

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

COLUMN: EMPATHY FOR MUSLIM ‘MOTHER-WORK’

In a literary marketplace saturated with Eurocentric accounts of motherhood, Suma Din’s creative non-fiction work,... Published 31 Dec, 2023 08:47am

COLUMN: WATER AND THIRST

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

COLUMN: COLONIALISM, PLANTS AND HUMANS

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

COLUMN: Linguistic hierarchies

Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s debut novel, The Centre, takes readers into a cutthroat world of language, translation ... Published 25 Jun, 2023 05:15am

COLUMN: CTRL-ALT-DEL UIGHUR CULTURE

The Uighurs — Turkic Muslims of China’s Xinjiang province, also known as East Turkestan — suffer from a covert but aggressive.. Published 22 Apr, 2023 07:14am

COLUMN: ECO-FEMINISM AND POWER

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

COLUMN: FUTURE IMPERFECT

The causal link between environmental damage and pandemics during the Anthropocene is a recurring topic in books... Updated 19 Feb, 2023 08:26am

COLUMN: THE JOY OF WANDERING

Kamila Shamsie’s new novel Best of Friends begins as a love letter to Karachi, that city by the sea which the writer spent so much Published 16 Oct, 2022 08:17am

COLUMN: AS THE WORLD TURNS DARK

One of the finest facets of Mohsin Hamid’s body of fiction is its exuberant play with form. This experimentation ... Published 14 Aug, 2022 05:12am

COLUMN: TRUE CRIME IN COVID TIME

I’m writing a book about literature, Covid, race and colonialism. During my research, I was deeply moved by Roopa... Updated 13 Jun, 2022 12:14pm

COLUMN: BALOCHISTAN BITES

During a holiday from the school I was teaching at in mid-1990s Peshawar, I was fortunate to spend a few days in... Published 24 Apr, 2022 07:08am

COLUMN: SEVENTY YEARS OF SKIN

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was a colonial subject from the small Caribbean island of Martinique, then a... Published 06 Mar, 2022 07:01am

COLUMN: VIRAL IMPERIALISM

In a thoughtful article in The Guardian about burnout amid Covid-19, Christine Berry wrote: “The pandemic isn’t... Published 16 Jan, 2022 06:59am