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 a Betty Trask Award and the Authors’ Club First Novel Award, and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Whitbread First Novel Award. His second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), which took 11 years to write, won the 2005 Encore Award and the 2005 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. 

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,  Flaubert, Proust, isolation, engagement and Yorkshire.