Daniyal Mueenuddin

Daniyal Mueenuddin reads an excerpt from his short story “Nawabdin Electrician”, London, 2009

Daniyal Mueenuddin (born 1963) is a Pakistani-American author of the critically acclaimed short-story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, published in the United States by W. W. Norton in 2009, and in nineteen other countries in sixteen languages.^[1][2][3][4]

Biography

Daniyal's father, Ghulam Mueenuddin, was a member of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), and after the Partition of India he became Secretary of Pakistan's Establishment Division, which administered the civil service (later he was the country's Chief Election Commissioner).^[5] In the late 1950s he was posted for several years to Washington as chief negotiator of the Indus Waters Treaty (1960) between India and Pakistan.^[6] While living there he met his future American wife Barbara,^[5] a reporter at The Washington Post.^[4] After a courtship and marriage they moved to Pakistan in 1960, living first in Rawalpindi and later in Lahore.^[4][7] Keeping with an agreement she had made with her father, a surgeon in Los Angeles who had heard of unsanitary conditions in Pakistani hospitals, his expectant mother flew back to the U.S. in March 1963, and Mueenuddin was born in Los Angeles in April. Two months later mother and child returned to Lahore, Pakistan, where Daniyal spent his childhood and attended Lahore American School.^[3][7] The family spent long holidays on his father's family farm in South Punjab, and Mueenuddin remembers this as a magical time which included long days hunting duck and partridge, picnics out in the Thar desert at the abandoned Fort Derawar, and riding recalcitrant local ponies.^[4] Daniyal and his brother Tamur^[8] often visited the US in the summers.^[4] At age 13 his parents separated and the two boys moved with their mother back to the US, where Daniyal spent 5 years at prep-school, Groton School in MA, graduating in 1981.^[3] Later he graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth College.^[3][5] The summer of his graduation he returned to Pakistan where his father, now in his 80s and failing health, was losing control of the family farm to its managers. His father asked him to stay in Pakistan and rescue the farm.^[4] It was a lonely and arduous life, but one well suited to Daniyal, who spent early mornings writing poetry, and evenings reading through the library that his mother had left behind.^[4] (Later in life Daniyal would thank his mother for teaching him "that becoming a writer was a legitimate thing to do."^[9] His mother was a Trustee of PEN American Center and died in November 2009.)^[10] In 1990 his father died, leaving Daniyal more exposed but also more independent. He ran the farm as a business, and not in the traditional feudal way like many of his neighbors, by "hiring good managers, paying them well, and demanding a lot of them."^[4] In 1993, with the farm running fairly smoothly, he decided to spend time in the West again^[7] and moved back to the US where he attended Yale Law School for three years, editing the Yale Journal of International Law and serving as Director of the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic. After graduation he worked briefly at Human Rights Watch and then as a corporate lawyer at the New York firm Debevoise & Plimpton between 1998 and 2001.^[5][7] However he found the life unsatisfying, saying:

Sitting in my office on the forty-second floor of a black skyscraper in Manhattan, looking out over the East river, I gradually developed confidence in the stories I had lived through during those years on the farm. I realized that I was in a unique position to write these stories for a Western audience – stories about the farm and the old feudal ways, the dissolving feudal order and the new way coming, the sleek businessmen from the cities. I resigned from the law firm, returned to Pakistan, and began writing the stories that make up In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.^[7]

He enrolled in the MFA program (writing) at the University of Arizona at Tucson, where he earned a degree in 2004.^[3] His first published story was "Our Lady of Paris" published in Zoetrope: All-Story in Fall 2006.^[11] This gained the attention of a literary agent,^[4] Bill Clegg,^[12] who then helped him to publish a story in Granta and three stories in The New Yorker.^[13] Mueenuddin's first collection of stories In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was published in February 2009 (4 new stories, plus the 4 previously published). Mueenuddin's writing is influenced by Anton Chekov, "I like the Russians, like everyone else. I am constantly reading Chekov. I am never not reading Chekov."^[14] Mueenuddin is currently working on a novel set in 1970's Pakistan.^[14]

Mueenuddin is married to Cecilie Brenden Mueenuddin, a Norwegian Arabist and Middle Eastern scholar, whom he met while on a Fulbright Scholarship in Oslo, Norway.^[12] His previous marriage was to New York artist and lawyer Rachel Jeanne Harris in 1999.^[5]

Awards and nominations

Mueenuddin was the winner of the 2010 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was the winner of The Story Prize for 2009, and the 2010 Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Best First Book, Europe and South Asia). The collection was also a finalist for the 2009 National Book Awards, the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, the 2010 Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award, and the 2010 Ondaatje Prize.^[15] In addition, it was selected among TIME magazine's top ten books of the year, Publishers Weekly's top ten books of 2009, The Economist's top ten fiction books of 2009, The Guardian's best books of the year, The New Statesman's best books of the year, and The New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year.

One of his short stories, "Nawabdin Electrician", was selected by Salman Rushdie for the Best American Short Stories of 2008.^[12] Another story, "A Spoiled Man", was selected for the 2010 edition of The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories.^[16]

"In Other Rooms, Other Wonders" has been published in 19 countries in 16 languages.

Works

• In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, W. W. Norton, New York City, NY 2009 ISBN 978-0-393-33720-4

Notes

1. ^ "Sex and Other Social Devices", New York Times, DALIA SOFER, February 6, 2009
2. ^ "Michael Dirda on 'In Other Rooms, Other Wonders'", Washington Post, Michael Dirda, February 15, 2009
3. ^ ^{a b c d e} "Tales From a Punjab Mango Farm", Wall Street Journal, Feb 3, 2009
4. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h i} "Writing the Unknown Pakistan", On Point, interview.
5. ^ ^{a b c d e} WEDDINGS; Ms. Harris, Mr. Mueenuddin, New York Times, June 13, 1999
6. ^ "India and Pakistan", The Atlantic, November 1960. "Ghulam Mueenuddin, Pakistan's chief negotiator.."
7. ^ ^{a b c d e} Author Interview, BookBrowse
8. ^ Edward Davis. Obituary. The East Hampton Star, September 10, 2009. "Mr. Davis was a stepfather to Tamur and Daniyal Mueenuddin.."
9. ^ "Daniyal Mueenuddin Takes Home Story Prize", Poets & Writers Magazine blog, March 4, 2010. Includes video.
10. ^ Paid Notice: Deaths DAVIS, BARBARA THOMPSON, New York Times, October 25, 2009
11. ^ "Our Lady of Paris", Zoetrope: All-Story, Fall 2006, Vol. 10, No. 3
12. ^ ^{a b c} Interview, The Elegant Variation, April 24, 2009
13. ^ Works by Daniyal Mueenuddin, at The New Yorker
14. ^ ^{a b} "Interview With Daniyal Mueenuddin" in Beyond The Margins, Javed Jahangir, Feb 23, 2010
15. ^ "Ondaatje prize shortlist wanders from Pakistan to Hackney", Michelle Pauli, The Guardian, 20 May 2010
16. ^ PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2010, TOC.

External links

• InOtherRooms.com, Daniyal Mueenuddin's Official Website
• Video: Daniyal Mueenuddin and Moshin Hamid at The Asia Society (Filmed on Feb. 23, 2009, Fora.tv)
• Video: The Story Prize reading with Victoria Patterson and Wells Tower. March 3, 2010.
• Stories by Daniyal Mueenuddin published in The New Yorker
• "Our Lady of Paris", Zoetrope: All-Story, Fall 2006, Vol. 10, No. 3

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Name	Mueenuddin, Daniyal
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Date of birth	1963
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