Daniyal Mueenuddin

Bio

Mueenuddin was born to a Pakistani father Ghulam Mueenuddin and an American mother Barbara.In the late 1950s, Mueenuddin's father was posted for several years to Washington as chief negotiator of the Indus Waters Treaty (1960) between India and Pakistan, where he met his future American wife Barbara, a reporter at The Washington Post. After a courtship and marriage they moved to Pakistan in 1960, living first in Rawalpindi and later in Lahore. 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. and Mueenuddin was born in Los Angeles in April. Two months later mother and child returned to Lahore, Pakistan, where Mueenuddin spent his childhood and attended the Lahore American School. Mueenuddin remembers his youth there as a "magical" time which included hunting and riding. Mueenuddin and his brother Tamur often visited the US in the summers. At age 13 his parents separated and the two boys moved with their mother back to the US, where Mueenuddin spent five years at prep-school, Groton School in MA, graduating in 1981. Later he graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth College . The summer of his graduation he returned to Pakistan where his father, at his 80s was failing health, and losing control of the family farm to its managers. His father asked him to stay in Pakistan and rescue the farm. Mueenuddin returned Pakistan for his father was failing health, he recalled it as 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. Mueenuddin would thank his mother for teaching him "that becoming a writer was a legitimate thing to do." In 1993, with the farm running fairly smoothly, he decided to spend time in the West again 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. However he found the life unsatisfying and decided to begin a new career in writing. He enrolled in the MFA program (writing) at the University of Arizona at Tucson, where he earned a degree in 2004. His first published story was Our Lady of Paris published in Zoetrope: All-Story in Fall 2006. This gained the attention of a literary agent Bill Clegg, who then helped him to publish a story in Granta and three stories in The New Yorker . Mueenuddin's first collection of stories In Other Rooms , Other Wonders was published in February 2009. Mueenuddin's writing is influenced by Anton Chekov. Mueenuddin is currently working on a novel set in 1970s Pakistan. 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 . 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. Another story, A Spoiled Man , was selected for the 2010 edition of The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories . In Other Rooms , Other Wonders has been published in 19 countries in 16 languages.