A conversation with Nadeem Aslam about The Wasted Vigil
Nadeem Aslam was born in Pakistan in 1966, moved to the UK as a teenager and now lives in London. He studied Biochemistry at the University of Manchester, but left to become a writer. His first novel, Season of the Rainbirds (1993) won\xa0a Betty Trask\xa0Award and the Authors\u2019 Club First Novel Award, and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Whitbread First\xa0Novel Award. His second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), which took\xa011 years to write,\xa0won the 2005 Encore\xa0Award and the 2005 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize.\xa0
We met in Toronto at the IFOA, to talk about his novel The Wasted Vigil, about technique, self knowledge, writing 100 page biographies of his characters, the universal from the particular, Afghanistan, war, politics, love, the ignorance of history,\xa0 Flaubert, Proust, isolation, engagement and Yorkshire.
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