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MEET THE AUTHOR
Reviewed By Janet Mawdesley August 13, 2014
In an incisive hour spent with bestselling author Qaisra Shahraz at the Flinders University recently she gave her small but interested audience an in-depth look into what makes a bestselling author and how she creates her characters and plot.
As a young girl of nine years old she and her parents moved to from their homeland of Pakistan to the large Midlands city of Manchester in England. There she grew up with her younger siblings in a very multicultural manner.
By day and at school she would wear her jeans, fitting comfortably into the western culture. On her return home she would change into the dress of her families culture; switching her language to her native tongue. She considered this to be a normal part of everyday life, never realising that she was receiving a gift of adaptation, which as she developed her undoubted talent for writing, gave her the inspiration, insight and basis for her stories.
She clearly remembers her days with her grandmother in a small village. This village has become a setting familiar to her readers as the home village of her characters in her three novels, The Holy Woman, Typhoon and Revolt.
Each novel is based around women and their empowerment, with each of the novels being written during vastly differing times of her life. The first as a young mother of three, the second following some years later, with a number of the characters from the Holy Woman again holding fast. Her third novel Revolt, taking many years and several rewrites to finish, culminated in a story that covers much territory resulting in a powerful novel of mixed marriages.
She is at pains to describe Typhoon as a sequel and prequel as several of her characters refused to stay in one novel but came into following novels with a right to be present. This not only gives a seamlessness to the lifestyle she strives to portray of a woman’s lot in modern Pakistan, where they are still bound by customs ages old, even though many are educated and professional women.
Each novel to date deals with specifics of the lifestyle, portraying her characters as feisty women who will not bow down to the dictates required and therefore setting the village to gossip and wonder, let alone creating endless upheaval within the family.
Written to appeal to a wide range of readers the detail that has gone into the writing paints a picture that entices you into village life with the characters and their stories wrapping themselves into your psych.
Loved by millions of reader’s worldwide, translated in several languages, and massively popular in her home country of Pakistan, Qaisra Shahraz uses the medium of her stories to help bridge a gap between eastern and western cultures, while endeavouring to raise awareness and understanding in a different and more gentle manner.
When asked which of her stories she favours, it seems it is the first piece she had published in 1988 in a collection of short stories titled A Pair of Jeans, earning her the sum of Seventy Five pounds, has gone on to top popularity charts, has been published 12 times and has been included in the syllabus in Germany.
What makes a good writer? Well that is something a little more complex but as Qaisra says, having a good imagination, taking writers workshops and creative writing courses to learn the craft all help.
Her next novel set in Morocco, a place recently visited and researched, is in the making and touches on the issues of ‘honor killing’, which portrays the lives of women trapped in an unjust society.