Zia Haider Rahman

Zia Haider Rahman British novelist and broadcaster. His novel In the Light of What We Know was published in 2014 to international critical acclaim and translated into many languages. He was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Britain’s oldest literary prize, previous winners of which include Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie and Cormac McCarthy. Rahman was born in Bangladesh in the region of Sylhet.[3] His mother tongue is Sylheti, although he understands some Bengali.[4][5] His family moved to England when Rahman was small, where they were squatters in a derelict building before being moved to a council estate. His father was a bus conductor and waiter and his mother a seamstress. He attended Hampstead comprehensive school in London. In an interview with Guernica, he said that he "grew up in poverty, in some of the worst conditions in a developed economy." Rahman was a college scholar at Balliol College, one of the constituent colleges of Oxford University, and received a first class honours degree in mathematics before completing further studies in mathematics, economics, and law at the Maximilianeum, a foundation for gifted students, and Munich, Cambridge, and Yale universities. He briefly worked as an investment banker for Goldman Sachs in New York before practising as a corporate lawyer and then as an international human rights lawyer with the Open Society Foundations, focusing on grand corruption in Africa. He has also worked as an anti-corruption activist for Transparency International in South Asia.