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Kamila Shamsie (born 1973) is a Pakistani novelist, who writes in the English language. She was brought up in Karachi and attended Karachi Grammar School.

She has a BA in Creative Writing from Hamilton College, and an MFA from the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she was influenced by the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali. Kamila wrote her first novel, In The City By The Sea, while she was still at UMass, and it was published in 1998. It was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in the UK, and she received the Prime Minister's Award for Literature in Pakistan in 1999. Her second novel, Salt and Saffron, followed in 2000, after which she was selected as one of Orange's 21 Writers of the 21st century. Her third novel, Kartography, received widespread critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys award in the UK. Both "Kartography" and her next novel, Broken Verses have won the Patras Bukhari Award from the Academy of Letters in Pakistan. Her fifth novel "Burnt Shadows" has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her books have been translated in a number of languages.

She is also a reviewer and columnist - primarily for the Guardian- and has been a judge for several literary awards including The Orange Award for New Writing and The Guardian First Book Award.

She is the daughter of the famous literary journalist, compiler and editor Muneeza Shamsie, niece of Attia Hosain and granddaughter of the writer, Begum Jahanara Habibullah. Her sister is Saman Shamsie who currently teaches O- level Physics and SAT writing and reading at Karachi Grammar School.

In 2009, she donated the short story The Desert Torso to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the 'Air' collection.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Kamila Shamsie", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0