Kamila Shamsie on friendships, familiar locations & free speech

The latest work from author Kamila Shamsie, Best of Friends begins in Karachi in 1988, with 14-year-old friends Maryam and Zahra and the seemingly endless possibilities of a country emerging from the darkness of dictatorship to a bright future under the leadership of Benazir Bhutto. Yet the girls’ childhood are brought to an abrupt end by a decision at a party, one which will shape their futures, and come to light once more as we rejoin the pair three decades later in London.

Born and raised in Karachi Kamila Shamsie is the author of seven previous novels, including the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winning Burnt Shadows, and the Women’s Prize for Fiction winning Home Fire. A three-time winner of the Patris Bokhari Award, her work has been translated into over 25 languages. 

In late September 2022 Shamsie joined us at the Southbank Centre to launch and discuss her latest novel, with journalist Nesrine Malik. Ahead of this event we caught up with the author to talk about the book, the theme of friendship, the lure of Karachi, and literary freedom. 

You’re joining us here at the Southbank Centre to discuss your new book Best of Friends, which is published in late September, 2022. How does this hinterland moment between finishing work on a novel, and its publication, feel to you?

Increasingly I think of this as the passage of time in which I learn to let go of the novel I’ve written. The writing itself is such an intimate process — the characters and their world occupy so much of my brain and my time. Then the book enters the world and its readers get to have ownership of it. I’m very grateful for that and would hate for it to be otherwise — but it can still be a strange thing when other people are interpreting and thinking about your characters in ways you didn’t anticipate. So this letting go period feels necessary to create some distance between me and the book. I stop being the person writing the book and start being the person answering questions about writing the book. 

In Best of Friends, we first meet characters Maryam and Zahra in 1988, as 14 year olds in Karachi. At that time you would have been a similar age in the same city; how much of your own childhood is reflected in this period of the characters’ lives?

Oh, a lot. The characters themselves aren’t based on anyone I grew up with but their world is very much my teenaged world — from the music they love (Tracy Chapman, George Michael) to the writers they’re reading (Jackie Collins) to the experience of witnessing dramatic political changes which feel both really significant and yet incidental to the day to day stuff of their lives. It was actually a lot of fun to recall and re-create on the page aspects of Karachi life that are now long gone: such as the ‘video shop’ culture that brought all the mainstream Hollywood films into our homes. I had a very enjoyable day going on Twitter and asking Karachi people of my generation to remind me of the names of different video shops (which brought with it an excellent set of anecdotes).

‘It was a lot of fun to recall and re-create on the page aspects of Karachi life that are now long gone. I had a very enjoyable day on Twitter and asking Karachi people of my generation to remind me of the names of different video shops.’

You mention Karachi, which is the setting for many of your previous books, as well as much of Best of Friends; what is it that keeps drawing you back to the city as a setting?

Best of Friends is actually a return to Karachi as a significant setting after many years. My first four novels were all set in Karachi — at the time I wrote those I was still living in Karachi, and it was also where I’d grown up so I didn’t see where else I would be writing about. Burnt Shadows, which I was working on when I moved from Karachi to London, started to move away, starting in Nagasaki and ending in New York and Afghanistan. A God in Every Stone barely features Karachi at all, and Home Fire is a London novel with only a cameo appearance by Karachi. 

But when I knew that I would write a novel starting with two girls in their adolescence there was no option other than Karachi in the 1980s that entered my mind — I know what it was to be an adolescent in that place and time so I had a lot to draw on, but also I had wanted for a while to write about that period of time when dictatorship gave way to democracy, and a male head of state gave way to a 35 year old woman.

What drew you to the theme of friendship?

Probably the importance of friends in my life. I’ve known for a long time that I wanted to place friendship at the centre of a novel — while friendships are so valuable and sustaining in people’s lives they so often become a side story in fiction. When I was at university, one of my friends said that the real hero of Hamlet is Horatio and there was a point when I thought what it might be like to re-tell Hamlet as a story of friendship narrated by Horatio — so clearly that interest in writing about friendship has been there a very long time. I don’t know what took me so long to get to it. 

‘I’ve known for a long time that I wanted to place friendship at the centre of a novel — while friendships are so valuable and sustaining our lives they so often become a side story in fiction.’

One of the things explored in Best of Friends is what exactly our longest friendships can endure; do you think this is tested more in modern society than in past generations?

No, I think it’s our shortest friendships that might be more tested these days than previously, now that our view of other people’s characters aren’t only shaped by our interactions with them but with their social media profile. It’s very easy to decide that someone you’re only just getting to know isn’t really worth the effort. But long friendships function differently — you know each other’s characters and you choose to remain friends despite knowing the other person’s flaws. That doesn’t mean the flaws can’t become magnified under certain circumstances, threatening the friendship — as happens in Best of Friends. But there really is nothing new in that. 

As we speak, the literary world is dominated by the news of the attack on Salman Rushdie; what are your thoughts on the importance of, or the need for, free speech within literature?

I grew up in a Pakistan in which some of our greatest writers — Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Fehmida Riaz — were in exile because their writing made it impossible for them to safely or freely live in their own countries. That kind of upbringing gives you a pretty strong and unshakeable idea of how high the risks and stakes can be for writers. Salman Rushdie falls in that category of writers whose lives are threatened by a government, and it has been stomach-churning to see how the risk that seemed to have abated could so rapidly become a life-threatening reality again.

There’s been a lot of talk that attempts to draw analogies between the Rushdie attack and so called cancel-culture and not enough attention paid to the event at which Rushdie was attacked — it was organised by City of Asylum in Pittsburgh, part of the International Cities of Refuge Network that offer long-term refuge to persecuted writers and artists. There are more than 50 ICORN cities around the world, but none of them are in the UK. One of the ways in which the UK could really show its commitment to free speech is to establish cities of refuge here, with commitments from the government to grant visas and refugee status to persecuted writers and artists rather than, say, placing them on deportation flights to Rwanda.

‘It has been stomach-churning to see how the risks to writers that seemed to have abated could so rapidly become a life-threatening reality again.’

Has the reaction to any of your works ever taken you by surprise, either in the way a book was received or interpreted?

It would be a sign of failure if that wasn’t the case. I always want to write novels where there are large spaces for readers to enter and interpret, and quite often the results are unexpected. I’m always perfectly happy for readers to develop strong feelings (negative or positive) about my characters and have a far stronger certainty than me of what happens after the novel ends.

Where it feels dispiriting is when you see people bring their own prejudices and preconceptions of a novel and shape their reading around that, even if it means ignoring what’s actually in the novel. For instance with Burnt Shadows, there’s a character in early 1980s Karachi who thinks it would be a great adventure to go and join the Afghan mujahideen who are fighting the Soviets. There was a review somewhere in America (I’ve blocked the details out of my mind) claiming the character wanted to join the Taliban — even though there was no Taliban in the 1980s, and the character quite clearly would never be drawn to such an organisation.

Your work to date has seen you win several literary prizes; what does winning a prize give you as a writer? Is it an encouragement, something of a nice accolade, or would you prefer not to receive them at all?

If I preferred not to receive them I would tell my publishers not to enter me for them.  What it actually means to win a prize varies with the prize. It’s always a lovely feeling to win — sometimes all you get from it is the lovely feeling, other times you get a nice cheque which is always useful, and yet other times you get a huge amount of new readers as a result of the ensuing publicity, which is the finest thing of all. 

And lastly, to return to Best of Friends, what do you hope readers will take from the book?

Pleasure. Beyond that, what readers take from a book depends on what they bring to a book. I don’t try to guess or anticipate what that might be. Having said that, it is very nice to already hear from readers that they’re telling their oldest/closest friends to read the book in order to discuss it with them.

Interview by Glen Wilson