Dur e Aziz Amna Books In Order
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American Fever | (2022) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
Your Tongue Is Still Yours: Reflections On Language | (2019) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Dur e Aziz Amna is a literary fiction author that is best known for her 2022 debut work of fiction “American Fever.” The author was born in 1992 and spent much of her childhood in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi.
Since the publishing of her debut, she has been the winner of several awards including the Short Story Competition by the London Magazine, and the Financial Times Essay Prize in addition to making the longlist for the Audible Short Story Award by the Sunday Times.
Amna’s work has been shortlisted and featured in many other places including Dawn, Himal Southasian, Longreads, and others. For her work, Dur has been a fellow at the Department of Cultural Affairs in New York City and Aspen Words.
In 2015, she graduated from Yale with an English Literature degree before proceeding to the Hellen Zell Writers’ Program at the Univerity of Michigan where she got her MFA.
In 2022, Dur e Aziz Amna was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 following the success of the Sceptre-published novel “American Fever.”
Aziz Amna was born and spent much of her childhood in Pakistan and only moved to the United States when she was nineteen.
Nonetheless, writing is something she started to do while she was still in Pakistan. She used to read the supplements that usually come with the weeklies and this made her aware of audiences at a very early age.
She realized that there was a massive audience outside of her community and hence she set out not only to speak to her community but also to readers outside it.
When writing her fiction she intends to get people outside of Pakistan to get an understanding of what happens in her community and her country. She also intends to send messages about the history of the Indian subcontinent stretching to the independence from the British and the consequent partition.
While she decries the centuries-old domination and presence of colonialism in South Asia, she is happy that this provided a huge English audience in Pakistan and India but also abroad in Europe and the North American continent.
As for inspiration, Dur e Aziz Amna has said that she gets much of her inspiration from Faiz Ahmad Faiz the Pakistani poet. In fact, the first epigraph in her debut is the poet’s most famous line. Dur has also been influenced by other memoirists such as Binyavanga Wainaina, Ibn-e-Insha, Hisham Matar, and Joan Didion.
She is also grateful for the works of the likes of brilliant thought leaders such as Aamir Mufti, Frantz Fanon, Minae Mizumura, Aijaz Ahmad, and Aime Cesaire. All these have challenged her ideas about culture and language and influenced what she writes about.
Other works that she has read include “Lost Children Archive” by Valeria Luiselli, “The Quiet American” by Graham Green, “Brooklyn” by Colm Toibin, and “Season of Migration” to the North by Tayeb Salih.
When it came to writing, she had her good and bad days just like most authors. When she started writing her debut novel, Dur Amna used to work unproductive sprints snatching minutes here and there.
There were times when she wrote nothing for a year before going on a marathon of writing for months every single day. The thing she had going for was that the plot and premise were very clear from the start.
The bad days were not that many during this time as they are right now when she has kids and can only write for a few minutes here and there while her kids are asleep.
She would ultimately publish “American Fever” her debut novel in 2022. The work went on to become a blockbuster work, winning all manner of literary fiction awards.
“American Fever” by Dur e Aziz Amna introduces a sixteen-year-old Pakistani girl named Hira. In 2010, she enrolled in an exchange program in small-town Oregon where she finds life is not what she expected.
Initially, the stubborn and prickly teenager was so eager to head to the US where she believes she will have all manner of opportunities to refashion herself. However, things turn out to be more difficult than she envisioned as he finds herself living in rural Oregon.
She is staying with Amy a teenage daughter and her single mother parent Kelly. It is not long before she thinks Kelly does not care for her even though this may be just a culture clash.
At her new home fixed mealtimes are unheard of and since she had been used to getting her meals prepped for her by her mother, she soon begins rapidly losing weight. Moreover, she is struggling to find places where she can find halal food.
In her quest to navigate the disinterest from Amy and the benign ignorance exhibited by Kelly, she is also familiarizing herself with life in America.
“American Fever” is a confident and promising debut as it keeps away from the common coming-of-age trope, even though the story still has an ambivalence, which adds nuance and depth to the story.
Dur e Aziz Amna’s novel “Your Tongue is Still Yours” is a short story fiction work. The lead in the novel is a woman who desires to protect the existence of her mother tongue. She encourages her husband to learn their mother tongue so that when they are in the United States they can speak Urdu.
The story is all about how different dialects and languages can impact people’s lives. “Your Tongue is Yours” is something of a poetic meditation on regional cultures, language, and the existence of identity in between the many layers that can be found between these two elements.
The languages that Dur writes about and which her characters attempt to learn include Wakhi, Punjabi, Khowar, Urdu, Shina, English, Balti, and Arabic.
Dur e Aziz Amna heads back to her home country of Pakistan as she traverses the diverse provinces and then heads back to New York. She then sits down to take stock of how language has shaped her life up to that point and how it might impact the lives and futures of her children too.
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