Internationally published Pakistani writer, Kamila Shamsie strikes gold – or should we say orange!   During the summer of 2001, author Kate Mosse, co-founder and honorary director of the Orange Prize for Fiction, novelist Andrea Levy, writer and literary editor of The Times, Erica Wagner and academic Lola Young laboured over selecting  possible recipients – among a cast of many – for Orange Futures, another step in the Orange Prize’s effort to promote worthwhile reading.

            The Orange Prize for Fiction was created in 1996 to promote outstanding writers irrespective of gender, age and creed.  Apart from the prize, the Orange team has, in collaboration with Harpers and Queen, initiated a programme aimed at the promotion of books by other young contemporary women writers to encourage them and promote good reading.

            ‘Twenty-one writers of the 21st century’ was the tag line for Orange Future   whose judges had to wade through numerous books and eventually whittle down the numbers to 21.  Orange’s criteria for selection included books with originality, passion and imagination, and those authors put on the shortlist could win the Orange Prize in the future.  Nominations were taken from a wide range of publishers, librarians, agents and booksellers.

            Among this elite corps is Salt and Saffron by Kamila Shamsie.  And she is in good company – prestigious writers like Zadie Smith, Sarah Waters and Nicola Barker are some of the other authors shortlisted by Orange.

            Says Shamsie of the honour of being in such august company, “It was exciting of course, but the most surreal moment came when a few of us Orange Future writers got together for a Harpers and Queen photo shoot.  One of the other writers turned to me and said, ‘When we were thinking about writing novels, we never thought we’d end up here, did we?”

           Kamila Shamsie was born in Pakistan and her very first novel, In the City by the Sea, published in 1998 was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize.  In 1999 Kamila was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literature in Pakistan.  At the age of 28, with her third novel, Kartography already published in Italy and due in UK by next summer, the attention Kamila is attracting internationally is cause for pride in Pakistan!.