Another side of the story - kamila shamsie

We were so busy, in fact, considering the moments that weren't in evidence that we didn't pay sufficient attention to what was actually happening - the quieter successes, the gradual emergence of a national literature in English. In 1997, Oxford University Press, Pakistan, commissioned the literary critic (and my mother) Muneeza Shamsie to compile an anthology of '50 years of Pakistani writing in English.' No one involved with the project in its early days imagined that the anthology, A Dragonfly in the Sun, would gather together 44 writers. Not all were novelists, nor even prose writers, but, as the writer Aamer Hussein says when speaking of its significance to him, "When I read A Dragonfly in the Sun I felt I had been given a home. For the first time I could look at a collection of writing and say, yes, that's where I belong."

[pls. click on the heading for the full article]

(thank you TBS for sending the link:))