Asian writer wins Britain's oldest literary prize with debut novel

LONDON: A Bangladeshi writer has won Britain's oldest literary award with his debut novel.
Novelist Zia Haider Rahman has joined some of the world's greatest literary names –DH Lawrence, Graham Greene, Angela Carter and Ian McEwan by winning this year's James Tait Black Literary Prizes - awarded annually by the University of Edinburgh, since 1919.
The winner of the £10,000 prize was announced at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Monday.
The winning book in the fiction prize, In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman was released in the spring of 2014 to international critical acclaim. Born in rural Bangladesh, the author was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and at Cambridge, Munich, and Yale Universities.
Chairman of the James Tait Black Prize for fiction professor Randall Stevenson of the University of Edinburgh said of winning fiction entry "Zia Haider Rahman addresses a whole range of issues – the war in Afghanistan, the rise of Muslim fundamentalism and the banking crisis. Moreover, he also explores problematic areas of politics and finance, which are often exiled from the pages of fiction, immersing his readers, dauntingly but comprehensibly. The novel's impressive scope is complemented by Rahman's ability to locate the personal in the political."
Zia's story revolves around an investment banker who on one September morning in 2008 receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse at a time when his career in collapse and his marriage unravelling. The A bold novel is set during the war and financial crisis that defined the beginning of our century.
The banker then recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power. In the Light of What We Know takes readers on a journey of exhilarating scope -- from Kabul to London, New York, Islamabad, Oxford, and Princeton -- and explores the great questions of love, belonging, science, and war.
Publishers say it is an age-old story: the friendship of two men and the betrayal of one by the other. The visitor, a man desperate to climb clear of his wrong beginnings, seeks atonement and the narrator sets out to tell his friend's story but finds himself at the limits.