Basharat Peer, is a Kashmiri journalist and script writer hailing from Kashmir and currently based in New York. He is also an author and political commentator.

Peer was born in Seer, Anantnag in Jammu and Kashmir. He attended school in the valley of Kashmir and continued his education after matriculation in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh away from his strife-ridden birthplace. He studied Political Science at Aligarh Muslim University and Journalism at Columbia University.

He started his career as a reporter at Rediff and Tehelka. During the initial days of his career he was based in Delhi. He has worked as an Assistant Editor at Foreign Affairs.

He was the Writer in residence at the Open Society Institute in New York, as indicated by his Wikipedia page. He was also the assistant editor of the American magazine Foreign Affairs and correspondents at Rediff and Tehelka. Besides this, he has also written for publications like The Guardian, The New Yorker, Financial Times, The National, the New Statesman and Columbia Journalism Review.

He is the author of Curfewed Night, an eyewitness account of the Kashmir conflict, which won the Crossword Prize for Non-Fiction and was chosen among the Books of the Year by The Economist and The New Yorker.

Basharat Peer always felt that Kashmiris living under Indian rule needed to tell their story like the Palestinians, Bosnians, Kurds and other people in conflict zones around the world. That led to his first book “Curfewed Night,” an evocative account of Mr. Peer’s years growing up in Kashmir as an armed insurgency against the Indian government gradually took root from the late 1980s.

Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir
Basharat Peer
As a young student in Delhi, Basharat Peer used to feel a sense of shame each time he walked into a bookshop. There were books written by people from almost every conflict zone of the age, but where were the stories of his own homeland of Kashmir?