Birth—1962
Where—Lahore
Education—

Bibliography

• Cafe Le Whore, Weavers Press (2013)

• The Idol Lover and Other Stories of Pakistan , Ithuriel’s Spear (2008)

• A Letter From India: Contemporary Short Stories from Pakistan, Penguin India ( 2004)

Moazzam Sheikh was born in Lahore. His mother was an actress and his father a cinematographer, though he later worked as a VIP receptionist at the Badshahi Mosque.

He is married to Amna Ali, the youngest daughter of the noted Punjabi writer Col. Nadir Ali. He has two sons, Amar and Arman. He is also a nephew of the politician Sheikh Rafiq Ahmed, the speaker of Punjab Assembly, and General Secretary of Pakistan People’s Party prior to his retirement from politics in the late 1990s.

He studied business, film and library science and is currently a librarian in the Art/Music/Recreation department at the San Francisco public library. In addition, he teaches at City College of San Francisco, writes fiction, and has also edited a collection of stories, A Letter from India: Contemporary Pakistani Short Stories (Penguin).

Searching for diversity and regional writers, Moazzam has not relied on Urdu only but tried to include stories from regional languages as well as dialects.

Described as ‘Pakistani immigrant Woody Allen of our times’, Moazzam Sheikh translates fiction from Urdu/Hindi/Punjabi/English.”

Moazzam’s Sheikh’s sexually-charged tales unfold against a backdrop of colonization and ethnic tensions in Pakistan and the Middle East, and they also explore the immigrant’s dilemma in the United States.

He “maps the ways in which South Asian identities cohere and threaten to disintegrate at the contradictory intersections of memory, desire, connection, and exploitation… Sheikh’s voice too, is unique, bringing to the English short story the flavor and verve of the Urdu/Hindi tradition”.

For Muneeza Shamsie Moazzam Sheikh is a “Born Storyteller”  whose  “accomplished tales move between two continents—and worlds—to tell of desire, war and the interplay of power and powerlessness in Pakistan, India, the Middle East and San Francisco. Tales also imbued with the immigrant’s sense of loss and quest for self amid new landscapes”.

Moazzam Sheikh has closely worked with Professor Roshni Rustomji-Kerns and Professor Umar Memon.

Some of his favorite writers are Juan Rulfo, Rushdie, Garcia Marquez, Dostoyevsky, Adrian Rich, Toni Morrison, Najm Hosain Syed, Naiyer Masud, Intizar Husain, and Uday Prakash.

Among the writers Moazzam Sheikh has translated are Naiyer Masud, Intizar Husain, Ikramullah, Kashinath Singh, Zubair Ahmed, Nadir Ali, Najm Hosain Syed, Juan Rulfo, Chinua Achebe, Manto, Faiza Rana among others.

Cafe Le Whore (2013)
It is difficult to decide which facts of an author’s life are relevant to a book review. A lot of reviewers have already made a big deal of the fact that Moazzam Sheikh is a Pakistani immigrant living in the USA.

The Idol Lover and Other Stories of Pakistan(2008)
When you open a book to read, a private dialogue ensues between you the reader and the protagonist or narrator of the story; the writer having done his work does not interfere.

A Letter from India: Contemporary Short Stories from Pakistan (2004)
Moazzam Sheikh’s compilation — including his own, an excellent piece of writing — relies heavily on Urdu contributions. The most outstanding among them is a Letter from India by Pakistan’s leading writer.

Moazzam Sheikh’s love affair with the short story
Moazzam has said elsewhere that his quest or attempt is to write stories of the immigrant who has made his life and home in a different world and it is these new stories that need to be told.  Home too must have a changing nature in fiction

Searching For Aunty Nimmi: An excerpt from Cafe Le Whore
Neighborhoods were like one’s first love and I loved the lanes and shops and houses like one is mesmerized by the power of one’s beloved’s limbs and voice. There were still a few people I knew would know where Aunty Nimmi made her home.

Monsoon Rains (The Idol Lover and Other Stories of Pakistan)
The early showers of the monsoon had struck the night before with full rage. Soon, the streets of Lahore would become rivers in August, carrying mud and filth.

Moazzam Sheikh: An Interview
There are two major ways in which a person remains in touch with his or her roots. One is by visiting the homeland, both physically and imaginatively, and/or finding an expatriate community nearby, both of which were accessible to me in San Francisco and around.