The Spinners Tale

Omar Shahid Hamid

Omar Shahid Hamid (born October 23, 1977) is a Pakistani writer, a serving police officer of the Police Service of Pakistan, and son of the assassinated Malik Shahid Hamid, Managing Director of the Karachi Electric Supply Corporation (KESC) While on sabbatical, Omar wrote a novel, The Prisoner (2013), inspired by his experiences in the police. The book became a bestseller in both India and Pakistan, was longlisted for the DSC South Asia Literature Prize, and is being adapted for a feature film. His second novel, The Spinner's Tale, was published in 2015 by Pan Macmillan India, and was loosely based on events and characters involved in the kidnapping of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was murdered in Karachi in 2002. The Spinner's Tale won the Karachi Literature Festival's fiction prize in 2017, and also won the Italy Reads Pakistan prize in the same year. Omar released his third book, The Party Worker, in January 2017. In 2018 he won the Karachi Literature Festival Fiction Prize a second time for The Party Worker (2017). The Party Worker was contracted in March 2019 for a Netflix adaptation. The Fix (2019) explored the arcane world of cricket match-fixing. Betrayal is his fifth novel. Shuja Nawaz, author of Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within, writes about Betrayal: “another riveting thriller ripped from the headlines by Omar Shahid Hamid. The counterterrorism expert takes you on a high-speed chase down the rabbit hole of hostile South Asian politics. The search for an Indian mole at the heart of Pakistan’s security structure takes you across the globe at breathless speed, combining a love story with the murky world of spycraft. You will want to read it non-stop