Skip to content

Kamila Shamsie: Home Fire

Series

When

Event Status

With her seventh novel, Home Fire, Pakistani-British author Kamila Shamsie has pulled off an improbable feat.

Home Fire is a work of great ambition (it’s a rigorously researched story of global terrorism, drawing its structure from Sophocles’ Antigone) and it’s also a gripping page-turner. It’s a stinging, and often funny, indictment on our facile political debates about terror, security and religious extremism. And it calls on us to recognise the humanity of both the powerless and the powerful in its story of citizenship and conflicting loyalties. The book’s cast of characters includes an Islamic State media recruit, his twin sister and a British Home Secretary.

Home Fire won last year’s Women’s Prize for Literature in the UK and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Shamsie has twice won the prestigious Patras Bokhari Award in Pakistan for previous novels. Her body of work is characterised by in-depth research, and a preoccupation with the ways in which political events impact on individual identities and family ties.

In conversation with Sonia Nair at the Wheeler Centre in May, the ingenious Shamsie will talk global faultlines and torn loyalties.

Hill of Content will be our bookseller for this event.

Featuring

Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie is the author of eight novels, which have been translated into over 30 languages, including Burnt Shadows and A God in Every Stone. Her previous novel Home Fire won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, was long listed for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Australian Book Indust... Read more

Sonia Nair

Sonia Nair is Program Manager at the Melbourne Writers Festival as well as a writer and critic whose literary criticism and social commentary have been published by the Wheeler Centre, Kill Your Darlings, the Big Issue, Eureka Street and the Lifted Brow, among others. She has chaired conversations a... Read more

Location

The Wheeler Centre

176 Little Lonsdale Street Melbourne Victoria 3000

More details

Stay up to date with our upcoming events and special announcements by subscribing to The Wheeler Centre's mailing list.

Privacy Policy

The Wheeler Centre acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Centre stands. We acknowledge and pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their Elders, past and present, as the custodians of the world’s oldest continuous living culture.